


home (where your heart is set in stone)

by HomebodyNobody



Category: Outer Banks (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Angst, Cooking, Cooking Lessons, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Farmer's Market, Fluff, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Party, Roommates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27427291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HomebodyNobody/pseuds/HomebodyNobody
Summary: Moving in with JJ Maybank was never part of the plan. She was supposed to be independent by now, in college working toward a degree in environmental engineering, maybe somewhere in California, or even Hawaii. But she’s not. She’s still stuck on Kildare, working at the Wreck and daydreaming about a life beyond the Outer Banks. She can’t pinpoint exactly where she went wrong, where The Plan failed and she fucked up enough to land here, in a shitty fishing shack on the marsh with a guy named Jesse fucking James, paying rent to Sarah Cameron’s boyfriend and still working at her parent’s restaurant, nearly two years out of high school with no future and no plan for one.------a roommate AU in which Kiara was never friends with the Pogues until after high school and thus is still finding out who she is and where she belongs. Alternatively; what is home, and where will she find it?
Relationships: JJ Maybank/Kiara Carrera, JJ/Kiara (Outer Banks), Kiara Carrera/JJ Maybank, Sarah Cameron/John B. Routledge
Comments: 91
Kudos: 116





	1. I don’t know what it’s like to be you (but I’m dying to)

**Author's Note:**

> pack in kiddos this is gonna be a long one   
> I have many many plans for these two, angst, fluff, smut -- all included. Kiara doesn't get much character development on the show so I decided to deep dive into her head and see how she would deal with the identity crisis of being on both sides of the cultural divide of Kildare Island. 
> 
> title from 'Home' by Gabrielle Aplin

Moving in with JJ Maybank was never part of the plan. She was supposed to be independent by now, in college working toward a degree in environmental engineering, maybe somewhere in California, or even Hawaii. But she’s not. She’s still stuck on Kildare, working at the Wreck and daydreaming about a life beyond the Outer Banks. She can’t pinpoint exactly where she went wrong, where The Plan failed and she fucked up enough to land here, in a shitty fishing shack on the marsh with a guy named Jesse fucking James, paying rent to Sarah Cameron’s boyfriend and still working at her parent’s restaurant, nearly two years out of high school with no future and no plan for one. 

Sarah and Kiara were close the first two years of high school, but had slowly grown apart, catching up occasionally but no longer integral to the others’ life. Sarah blamed growing up, and Kiara kind of blamed Sarah, but when Sarah mentioned that her boyfriend was moving out, or trying to, as they attempted to start a life together at the ripe old ages of 18 and 19, and he was looking for someone to help his old roommate cover the expense, Kie leapt at the chance. He wanted it all to be under the table, which, to her, felt like bad news, but apparently it was the house he grew up in, and he wanted to pay it off and fix it up at some point. The roommate evidently had nowhere else to go, and Sarah had politely refused to move in there (which should have been her first clue), so John B was looking for someone to take his room. And, apparently, dragging his feet about it. She understood the pickiness -- he didn’t want just anyone in his childhood room -- and since Sarah had vouched for her, she’d evidently passed the test.

The day she goes to see the place, some stupidly hot blond dude answers the door shirtless, introduces himself as Jesse James, and looks hurt when she laughs. “That’s not seriously your name,” she says. 

The hand he had offered to shake falls back to his side. “My friends call me JJ,” he answers. 

Oops. 

He shows her around, and the place is a shithole. There are two bedrooms, and only one cramped bathroom, and when she asks about the locked door off the kitchen, Jesse James’ face goes a little stony and he tells her they don’t use that room. Which she doesn’t get, cause there’s crap everywhere, clutter in addition to half-spent drinks and at least three ashtrays, with cigarettes and joints stubbed out next to each other. (At least he uses ashtrays.) One would think they’d use all the space they could get. 

She was warned, about how the house was sinking into the marsh, about the mildly unsafe porch and quirky A/C situation. Window units from at least three different decades stick out like dated lego blocks, some of them undoubtedly the reason for the cracked and sagging sills. It smells a little like boy funk and a lot like salt marsh, and after she checked out the deeply unimpressive inside, she tramped down the boat dock, standing either side of center and feeling the roll of the channel. This, at least, has been kept up, boards recently replaced in wide swathes and kept even and free of hangers-on. It’s not a death trap, at least, and there’s a motorboat tied up that tells her it’s well-used and cared for. She rejoins him by the woodshed, looking over his shoulder at the wall behind the dartboard, which is littered with chalk initials and score tallies occasionally scribbled over with expletives and insults. 

“She’s not much,” Jesse James says, like he hasn’t hastily been pushing trash and beer bottles into overstuffed garbage bags as she paced around the property. And God, he’s one of those guys that calls shit ‘she’ because clearly women are objects, the asshole. “But she’s home.” Kiara looks at him, and she’s never been good at keeping her emotions off her face, so she knows he’s seeing the skepticism in her eyes and maybe even a little bit of disgust because her shoes were definitely kind of sticking to the floor. “So?” he asks, after they look at each other for a second. “What do you think?” 

She thinks this is clearly the grimiest bachelor pad she’s ever seen, and not to stereotype, but she doesn’t think a woman has ever lived here.  _ I think it’s a piece of shit _ , she almost says.  _ I think there are dogs that live better than this _ .  _ I think I’m gonna need a hazmat suit to clean the bathroom _ . Jesse James, still stupidly hot and fully shirtless, smiles, and it’s casual and easy and lights up his clear blue eyes. “Yeah,” she says instead. “Okay.” 

Her mother looked excited for about half a second when Kiara said she was moving out, a face that fell when she said where. She reminds Kiara that she had potential. That she was going somewhere. That she had plans -- what had happened to those? Kiara swallowed the answer -- they were never hers. Her parents couldn’t understand, even as they helped her pack and loaded the boxes in the back of her jeep. They got her out -- did that job for her. They pulled her out of the Cut before she had to learn to swim in it, and now, they’re watching her jump right back in. She doesn’t much care, honestly. They’re still letting her work for them and as long as they leave her most of the way alone about it, she’ll get around to figuring something out. It’s not like she’ll be stuck in the Cut forever. She got good grades. She didn’t really do the whole ‘extracurriculars’ thing on account of the fact that most of her classmates were basically fascists-in-training, but she worked nearly full-time at her family-owned independent business and killed the SATs. Plenty of people work for a while after high school. She has options. 

She moves in to the Chateau (because of course this death trap has a name) and things are -- well. They’re okay. They’re livable. Technically. Kiara never considered herself a neat freak. She’s too much of a (self-proclaimed) free spirit for that. Shit ends up where shit ends up, and she usually refers to her system as ‘organized chaos’ and/or ‘everything is on the floor so I can  _ see it _ , Mom.’ But Jesse fucking James is on another level. Beer bottles are everywhere, she has stepped on a half-lit roach more than once, and dust piles up in terrifying corners, sometimes banding together and rolling across the floor in shapes that sometimes look like rats in the dark. 

She copes with it by never being home, even though most of the girls she hung out with in high school are still away at school and Sarah’s busy with her own move and she has nothing else to do but work and kick around Kildare. When she is there, she’s careful to make sure it’s when he isn’t -- taking closing shifts so she’s leaving as he comes home, usually from some job that involves coveralls and a bandana and a lot of dirt and grease that he tracks everywhere and gets all over the kitchen cabinets. He’s usually out on weekends, showering as fast as he can after work and then dashing to some party or kickback or whatever else you go to when you actually have friends. He invites her a couple times, and she gets corresponding encouragement texts from Sarah to ‘come chill!!’ but the thought of trying to fit in to another well-established crew where she’ll stand out and not get jokes and talk about shit no one cares about turns her stomach upside down so she pleads exhaustion and work and stays home. For the sorry state of the rest of the place, the TV in the living room is pretty great, (leave it to boys to prioritize the entertainment system over, like, a lock on the bathroom door) so after she hears him leave she sneaks out and eats junk food while daydreaming about a clean enough kitchen to actually use while she watches British people bake increasingly absurd things. 

It’s the kitchen that pisses her off the most. Her dad’s a cook, and she is, too, and as much as she loves the Wreck and all the wonderful people that make the fantail shrimp she’s eating daily, she’s sick of feeling bloated and actually craving spinach and smoothies at this point. She has groceries in the fridge, and she does her best to work around his mess, but no matter how many polite (towering) stacks she makes, he washes dishes on an as needed basis before replacing them in the sink, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him eat something that wasn’t delivered by courier or microwave. There’s no dishwasher, her dish towels keep going missing, and ‘gooey’ should never be a description for anything, especially a kitchen sink. It makes the decrepit, cramped, dark space even less welcoming, the smell clogging the stagnant air and making the inside feel just as much like a swamp as the outside. 

She thought that moving out of her parents house would -- change something. Even a little bit. She was suffocating there, under the careful eye of her parents and their constant pressure to be applying for something -- jobs and colleges and exchange programs. She felt smothered, trapped in a long, endless hallway with slowly encroaching walls and no way out. The Chateau is different, but also maybe worse. Where at home she felt constrained, here she feels lost, limited only by her hours at the Wreck, drowning in time, aimlessly surfing and binge-watching and staring at the stupid, stinking kitchen sink. 

After several days of polite requests -- and even a few passive-aggressive sticky notes -- she picks out all of his dishes, most of them crusty and weird-smelling, and walks into his room while he’s still asleep. Well. She kicks the door open, the wood vibrating into the wall. He sits bolt upright at the noise, shoulders immediately tense, glaring at her. He’s shirtless again, which seems chronic, for him, and his hair is a mess, tangled from sleep and sun-streaked. If he wasn’t such an irresponsible slob, he’d be pretty hot.

“Don’t fucking do that,” Jesse James says, and it’s the first time he’s ever sounded serious. He’s usually pretty easygoing, chatty to her monosyllables, always offering food or a favor or asking if she wants to come hang out with his friends. A twinge of apology shoots through her, but this is the first instance of roommate conflict. She has to stand her ground. 

She’d planned her words before she walked in, but they still shake on the way out. “This can’t happen,” she says, and his mouth is still tight, but he’s looking at her, at least. He hasn’t started yelling or kicked her out yet. “I know you’re used to living in a bachelor pad,” she goes on. “But I am a  _ girl _ , not a  _ bear _ , so please  _ wash your fucking dishes _ .” Lines delivered, it feels good for about half a second before she notices that he’s struggling to control his breathing, and he hasn’t moved. This decision was a little bit impulsive, driven by the rage of not being able to make breakfast in her own fucking kitchen and being fed up with his mess and his refusal to clean it up. Kie’s never been good at considering other people’s feelings, and she’s thinking she might have overstepped. 

“ _ Fine _ ,” he snaps back, staring at the pile of bowls leaking weird-smelling crap all over his comforter, refusing to make eye contact with her. He leans forward, pulling his knees up and leaning his elbows on them. He knits his fingers together, his well-muscled arms tense and defined. “Are you  _ done? _ ” His mouth, usually relaxed around a joint or a cigarette or chasing down the top of a beer bottle, is tight and angry and maybe a little bit afraid. 

Kiara takes a step back, her foot hitting a creaky floorboard, and flinches, his head sinking further into his shoulders, the slightest motion. “Are you --” she says, losing confidence by the second. “Are you gonna keep your shit clean?” But her voice is faltering now, and she’s too aware of herself in his space. She hasn’t been in his room, yet. It’s as messy as she would have expected, clothes coating the floor, papers in a concerning pile on his dresser -- she hopes they’re not important -- hints of who he is in every piece of clutter strewn across his desk and his nightstand. On second glance, his nightstand is actually a mini-fridge, the front covered in stickers, and there’s abandoned snacks everywhere she looks, neatly closed so nothing goes stale, just -- there, instead of the kitchen. So, a stoner, but like, a responsible one? Weird contrast. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says, keeping his voice even, ignorant to her combing eyes. “I’ll shape up.” She doesn’t leave, hovering near the door. He glances at her and then ducks his head again -- like he wants to look at her, but he’s afraid of what might find. There’s something fierce and unusually guarded in his stinging blue eyes, blinking rapidly, his jaw tense, teeth on edge. “Are you still here?” he asks.

“No I’m --” she backs up into the threshold, and he doesn’t take his eyes off her, watching her hands as they struggle to find a place to settle, tracking them, inhaling when they curl into fists as she shoves them down to her sides. “Sorry. I’m good. Good talk. Okay.” She turns and disappears back into her room, scrubbing her hands over her face. That didn’t go as planned. She collapses onto her bed, burying her face in her pillow and shoving her hands underneath. 

She avoids Jesse James for the rest of the day, hiding in her room for a couple hours before Netflix eventually fails to distract. She straps her board to the top of her car and heads to Rixon’s, hoping to drown her anxiety about the awkward situation in adrenaline and overheads. The day is crisp, spring melting out of winter, and she shimmies into her wetsuit as an afterthought, glad it was still in the backseat. There’s someone already there when she gets to the tideline, clothes left in a heap next to a battered army green backpack. The figure floats on the shining water, sitting out a lull and staring out to the horizon. 

_ That’s alright _ , she thinks,  _ there’s plenty of beach _ . She paddles out at least a hundred yards down the shore, and she really should have checked the tides before she headed out, because it’s almost completely dead. She gets a few waves and flips a few tricks, but she mostly just ends up sitting in the water, still as frustrated and annoyed with herself as when she got there. Eventually, after she’s been sitting on her board at least fifteen minutes with no waves in sight and her feet are starting to go numb, she paddles back in. The backpack that she passed by the access point is gone; clearly, the other surfer has also given up. She pikes her board in the sand and wiggles out of the top of her wetsuit, tying the sleeves around her waist. She plops down, legs crossed, her elbows on her knees, chin in her hands like a petulant child. She doesn’t want to go home yet. 

‘Home.’ What a stupid word. Is the Chateau her home, now? Is home her parents house, a monstrous, columned thing deep in Figure Eight? Is home still that cookie-cutter subdivision house she grew up in, just on the edge of the Cut? That’s the closest thing, she thinks, even though she hasn’t seen the place in five years. Does that mean she’s homeless? She feels that way, sometimes; like, even with a roof over her head, she still doesn’t belong anywhere. Home is a place where you can let your walls down. Kiara is a fortress. 

“Hey.” The voice from approximately two feet over and four feet up scares the ever-loving shit out of her, and she jumps, pushing sand in all directions. When she looks up, Jesse James is standing above her, offering her a Coor’s Light. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, out of reflex. “Are you following me?” She doesn’t know why she’s such an asshole to him. He’s been kind and understanding and overall friendly. He helped her move all her shit in, which he really didn’t have to do, and didn’t cuss her out for busting into his room this morning. And had she been in his position, there would have been blood. 

She reaches up to take the can in his hand, an acceptance of his proffered olive branch, but he pulls his hand back, raising an eyebrow. “Sorry,” she admits. “You startled me.” He hands her the beer. 

“Great minds, I guess,” he says, and settles himself next to her. 

“Not so great,” she replies, “we should have checked the tides.” 

He looks falsely hurt for a second, and it makes her want to smile. “Speak for yourself,” he says, and then sets his can in the sand, leaning back on his hands. “Give it an hour,” he nods to the northeast, indicating a bank of clouds slowly darkening that she hadn’t noticed in her angsty storm-off. “Then we’ll be in for some fun.” 

They sit in silence for a moment, and it itches. He’s frustratingly nonchalant, occasionally sipping his bear and watching the horizon, one hand picking up sand, absentmindedly letting it drain through his fingers. He’s sitting too close to her, his shoulder occasionally brushing hers. She doesn’t know if it’s intentional or not, born out of an inherent lack of regard for personal space or a calculated move to make her uncomfortable enough to apologize. A stubborn part of her wants him to break first, but then she looks at his face, and he’s far away and serene, not even aware of the battle she’s losing. 

“Hey, she says, and he lags for a second before looking at her, like he had to come back down from wherever his mind had been and settle into his body. “I’m sorry about this morning.” 

He shrugs. “No big. You were right, shit was nasty.” He looks back at the sky, but his ease has left him, and his face is tight as he squints his eyes against the late-afternoon light sparkling off the water. 

“Yeah,” she says, confused. He seemed pretty shaken up, at least as far as she could tell (which usually isn’t far), and this feels too easy. She’s looking at him now, as he refuses to make eye contact. “It’s just --” His shoulders go tight again. “I mean, I kicked the door in.” 

“It’s fine,” he insists, and drains the rest of his drink. “I --” he starts, like he’s gonna explain, and then his eyes dart to her over his shoulder, and he changes his mind. “It’s fine,” he repeats, shrugging, shaking his head a little. “No problem. We’re good.” She just watches him, not saying anything, and he flashes her a smile. “Hey,” he says, and his voice is sincere, even if his smile isn’t. “Don’t worry about it.” She takes his word for it, because she barely knows him, and he seems like he’s not gonna hold it against her. 

He heaves a sigh, and folds his legs underneath him, turning all the way toward her. “Listen,” he says. “Wrong foot, and all that.” He sticks out his hand. “I’m JJ.” 

She smiles, all the way this time, and it feels a little more natural, a little easier than normal. She’s been beating herself up about barging in on him for hours, in addition to feeling vaguely annoying and inconvenient ever since she moved in. This conversation -- introduction -- whatever it is -- feels overdue and deeply relieving. “I’m Kiara,” she says, shaking his hand. He smiles back, and this one’s real, sunny and full. 

“Nice to meet you.” 

Later, once they’ve surfed the swell and she’s been distracted by both JJ’s stupidly impressive abs and mildly annoyed by the fact that he’s a better surfer, they ride back into the shore. His smile is real, his shoulders relaxed, and he holds out his hand again. He seems like a completely different boy, like the water has washed away all the worry and tension from earlier. She goes to shake it, confused, and he laughs, dropping his board in the sand. 

“C’mon, Kie,” he says, and other people have shortened her name like that, old friends and her parents and maybe a couple others, through the years, but it’s never felt natural like this, never rolled out of someone’s mouth and settled directly into her chest in a way that makes her feel like it belongs there. Without question, he takes her wrist with his other hand and shows her how to curl her fist, bump it with his, and snap at the same time. “For next time,” he says, his blue eyes twinkling with dopamine from the exercise and perhaps a little bit of superiority, because he watched her have to bail way more times than him. “So you can get it right.” 

He makes it back before she does, because she’s hit by a stroke of inspiration on the way and stops by Heyward’s, picking up some vegetables and a loaf of bread. The kid behind the counter greets her by name, and laughs when she’s taken aback. The sound holds nothing back, filling up the small store and making people look at them, which he doesn’t even seem to notice. She’s seen this kid before, and watched him interact with Heyward himself in a manner entirely too familiar to be just an employee. She figures this might be his son. He looks about her age, and seems familiar, like they might have gone to school together before her parents decided to fake their way into the country clubs and fundraisers and a higher tax bracket.

“I’m Pope,” he says. “You’re living with JJ.” She nods slowly as she takes her change. She’s used to the anonymity of Figure Eight, to seeing the same faces and never knowing their names. The cashier at the supermarket on the other side of the island wouldn’t even bother to make eye contact, much less introduce herself. “JJ’s one of my best friends,” Pope explains, and pushes the groceries across the counter, handing her a receipt with the other hand. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.” It

“Yeah,” she agrees, because what else is she going to do? “See ya ‘round.” She thinks, probably too much, about the exchange as she drives home, worrying her lip with her teeth and half-paying attention. Pope knew who she was, what she looked like. JJ’s been talking about her, and the small, terrified part of her that never really left her freshman year of high school is wondering what he said. 

JJ’s already showered when she walks through the door, wearing a very soft-looking hoodie and loose basketball shorts, his tawny hair falling in his eyes. He takes one of the two bags, even when she attempts to brush him off, and takes it into the kitchen. He makes small talk as they put the food away, teasing her about taking so long to get back and recounting some of the more notable tricks she pulled earlier. She’s surprised and mildly pleased he was paying attention, and when he compliments her, she struggles to accept it gracefully. He smooths over her blundering, speaking about practically nothing at all, just filling the evening with comfortable chatter, not really minding when she struggles to respond naturally. He’s either not picking up that she’s still a little uncomfortable around him, especially in their shared space, or he’s really, really good at being aware without acknowledging it. Based on the little she knows about him, she’s guessing it’s the former. 

Pulling out a fourth bell pepper, he looks at her with a raised eyebrow. “This is a lot,” he says. “This isn’t gonna go bad?” 

“Well,” she says, standing on her tiptoes to tilt down a measuring cup. She doesn’t see the way JJ’s eyes trail up her body, the way he licks his lips as she lowers her weight back down onto her heels. “I thought that,” she says, turning around and keeping her eyes on the ingredients slowly accumulating on the counter. “Y’know,” she shrugs, and then digs behind the bowl she’d put out to function as a fruit bowl but JJ had filled with candy. It wasn’t even good candy, just skittles and twizzlers and other off-brand, weird shit. Pulling out a cutting board, she takes the pepper out of his hand. “I’d make dinner.” 

He smiles, wide and surprised and sincere, and she wonders offhandedly how a single gesture can have so many different meanings on one boy’s face. “You’re gonna make me dinner?” he asks, mischief rising in his voice. 

She points the knife at him. “Don’t get used to it.” 

She makes something easy, chicken and vegetables and pasta, one of those things you can just throw into a pan and season and people find it impressive. While she chops and boils and sautés, JJ sits on the counter, chatting aimlessly, which seems to be a skill of his, not minding when she just hums or offers little in response. It feels strangely comfortable, and a part of her watches from the outside, surprised at the ease with which they interact and she moves around him. At one point, she reaches over his shoulder, and he leans to the side so she can get something down, never interrupting his flow of words. She pauses, giving him a small smile, and he smiles back before continuing on about how, really, the California board company is overrated.

When it’s finally done, she hands him a bowl, and he looks unreasonably excited. “When was the last time you had a home-cooked meal?” she asks, remembering the freezer full of microwave dinners and the truly astronomical amount of ramen in the cabinet above the oven.

He lifts his head, counting backward like he can’t remember. “A long time,” he answers, quiet and suddenly serious. Then, he points his fork at her, leveling her with a mischievous stare. “You ready for me to try this?” he asks, abruptly changing his tone to dodge the question.

Kie’s cooked for a lot of people. She grew up in the kitchen of the Wreck, starting as a dishwasher (because her dad was insistent on her ‘paying her dues’) and eventually moved up to a line cook, which, for a nineteen year old girl, is a pretty good place to be. If she wanted to become a chef someday. (Which she might. Or maybe a professional surfer. Or an eco-conservationist. They’re all options, she just doesn’t know yet.) She shouldn’t be nervous about this, not when she’s witnessed him wolf down an entire can of spaghettios in 90 seconds flat. 

“Yeah,” she responds, forcing nonchalance. 

He looks at her like he thinks she might be lying, but he doesn’t know her well enough to say so. She looks down at the bowl she’s washing, pretending she doesn’t care about his reaction, but she cuts her eyes over to where he’s leaned against the counter. He puts a bite in his mouth and chews slowly, and her heart rate shouldn’t be this high. She’s been waitressing more in an attempt to avoid her dad, so she hasn’t cooked for anyone other than herself in a while, and her skills have stagnated because of it. She hasn’t been getting worse, she wouldn’t say, but she hasn’t been improving, and it’s frustrating. 

“Mmmph.” Her head snaps up as JJ lets out a deeply intimate noise. She looks at him, surprised, and his head is tilted back, his eyes closed. The sight, combined with the absurd moan, does something very interesting to her insides that she’d really rather not think too hard about. “Holy  _ shit _ , Kie,” he enthuses, his mouth still full. 

“Yeah?” she answers, the answer breathy and hopeful. She likes it, of course, when people like her cooking. It’s important to her, a part of her integral to who she is. Food is the way her family comes together, the way they show love and spend time together. If she can’t cook with someone, can’t eat with them or talk to them about food, she doesn’t really know how to interact with them. It’s important that JJ likes her cooking, for her pride, of course, but because otherwise, she wouldn’t know how to build a relationship with him. And she’s tried not having one -- it’s been difficult and awkward, and avoiding someone you live with, well. She’s had enough of that. 

“ _ Yes _ ,” he insists, and then brings the bowl closer to his face, taking several more large bites, chewing with his mouth open, because he’s an animal. She flicks water at him with wet hands. 

“Don’t  _ inhale _ it,” she chastises. “I put time into that, eat it like a human.” 

“Fine,  _ mom _ .” he snaps back, and she reacts physically to it, recoiling, her heart dropping through her stomach at the insinuation. This is part of the reason she didn’t just clean the kitchen before, why she insisted on him doing it instead of avoiding the conflict and doing it herself. She won’t have him expecting domesticity from her. Yes, she’s a woman, and she likes things clean, and she likes to cook, but that doesn’t mean anything else about her at all. She knew that cooking for him might lead to a conversation like this, and she needs to shut it down before it gets any further. 

“Um, no,” she says automatically. “No, we’re not doing that.” She’s aware of the aggression in her words as they slip out into the air, and she hopes she didn’t just ruin the first moment she’s actually enjoyed with him.

JJ doesn’t seem to stumble over it, doesn’t get defensive. “You cook, you clean,” he says, taking another bite, but smaller this time, and taking his time with it, even while he eggs her on. “Why not?” 

“Because you’re a grown-ass man,” she says, glad that they’ve kept the teasing tone, that he hasn’t told her to stop overreacting or calm down. She reaches around him to slip a knife back into the block. She’d had to buy one -- he had like three, all varying degrees of suspicious and cheap-looking, loose in a drawer. “And I’m not taking care of you.” 

He swallows and taps his fork against his lips, and his stupid blue eyes twinkle in the golden kitchen light fighting off the settling dusk. “Can I still eat your food?” he asks, and he must know how adorable and soft he looks in that hoodie, the sleeves half-covering his hands, the neck hanging wide on bare shoulders, barefoot and freshly-showered, smelling all naturally good and smiling at her. It started raining on her way home, the promised storm finally settling in above the island, and she’d had to open the kitchen window to stop the fidgety old smoke alarm from complaining about someone sautéing vegetables, so the marsh breeze brings in the smell of salt and petrichor. Peripherally, barely knowing it, she thinks about that word, from earlier --  _ home _ . 

“Tell you what,” she says, turning around from putting the spices back in the cabinet (all of which had been purchased by her). “Since you clearly can’t cook --” She puts her hands on her hips and he holds eye contact as he takes another bite, smirking around it because he’s riling her up on purpose, the little shit. “How ‘bout I teach you?” 


	2. if I could put myself in your shoes (I'd know what it's like to be you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'The silence that lingers is loaded. They have familiarity, to be sure, growing every day, but not comfortable vulnerability, not yet. ' 
> 
> JJ and Kiara are learning each other, slowly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... don't know what happened here. I would apologize but I'm pretty sure apologizing for long chapters is foolish bc readers (usually) appreciate them  
> anyway  
> there's a farmer's market and a party and lots of quippy banter and I hope you enjoy 
> 
> title from "Like to Be You" from Shawn Mendes (again, bc I think that it defines the beginning of their relationship really really well)

JJ takes the idea of her teaching him how to cook with a mildly off-putting level of enthusiasm. He talks about all the things he wants to learn how to make, everything from incredibly simple dishes to shit she’s never even heard of or would even know how to approach. He wakes her up the next morning by knocking on her door and asking if she can teach him how to make French toast. The teaching consists more of Kiara trying to get JJ to stand still for longer than two seconds and listen to her than actual learning, but he has fun, at least, bouncing around the kitchen with an ungodly amount of energy for 7 AM. He has to scrub maple syrup off his chin before he leaves for the auto shop, but when the door slams behind him, the silence that falls over the Chateau feels empty without his chaos to fill it up. 

She cleans up slowly, still in her pajamas, washing dishes one by one and putting them in the recently acquired drying rack, which she hoped would remove a step from washing dishes and therefore motivate JJ to wash his before they became independent life-forms. The sun is barely up, grey dawn washing the yard in a quiet, hopeful light. She hasn’t been up this early in -- well, probably in months. The Wreck doesn’t even open until ten, and even when she’s opening, she rolls out of bed thirty minutes before she has to be there, because it takes her five to get ready and twenty-five to get literally anywhere on Kildare from anywhere else. 

She hadn’t even realized the sun had barely risen, too focused on attempting to control her overgrown toddler of a roommate around an open flame. (Because hey, the Chateau is a shitshow, but at least it has a gas stove.) But it’s nice to have time to herself in the morning, and eating with JJ has given her enough energy to pick up the clothes that have turned into a carpet across her bedroom floor, and shower properly, giving her hair the time and attention it deserves instead of tying it up and hoping no one will notice the grease. When her hair is cleaned and tied up in a t-shirt, she feels the same old exhaustion settle in her bones, the desire to do anything but sleep leaving in one, sagging moment. She checks the clock. It’s 8:30. She has to be at work in an hour, needs at least ten minutes to get there -- she can sleep for 45 minutes, at least. She’d like longer, but if she doesn’t try, she won’t be able to get through her shift. 

She crashes out on the couch, because she knows if she tries to sleep in her bed, she just won’t get up. She can’t call out again this week -- even though she’s the owner’s kid, she only gets paid for the hours she works, and she still has to make rent and pay for groceries for, now, not only herself, but also an excitable prodigy. She lets her hair out, ties it half-back, and gets dressed in the usual frenzy of activity that precedes her actually getting out the door. She’s exactly on time, like she always is, and clocks in under the scrutinizing eye of Mike Carrera. 

“Kitchen or floor?” he asks, because he always does at the start of her shift, and she’s been choosing floor more and more often, just to avoid him. 

She ties on an apron and he looks surprised when she smiles. “Kitchen.” 

That weekend, she wakes JJ up at the ass-crack of dawn (in his words) in order to drag (again, his words) him to the farmer’s market. Sarah and John B are having a housewarming thing (six weeks late, but Sarah had to make sure the place was perfect), and she wants to bring something to share that they can keep in the fridge and eat for a while after. It’s still early in the season, so selection is bound to be a little limited, but Kiara likes to go as much as she can at first, so when it’s hopping and the tourons flood it in the summer, the vendors know her and will put things aside or give her good deals. The only downside is, it’s deep in Kook territory. 

Kiara drives, because the only vehicle JJ has is his terrifying dirt bike, and there’s no way she’s getting on the back of that, much less attempting to bring back groceries. Her Nissan is old and dusty and the front is banged up, but it runs and holds a few surfboards and will last more than a few years, yet, so she loves it. JJ looks like he wants to say something when they go to get in, holding back towards the house. “What?” she challenges. His hands are shoved in his pockets.

“Aren’t kooks supposed to have nice cars?” he asks, and the question feels like an actual slap in the face. She knows what she looks like, what everyone on the Cut thinks she is. She knows where her parents live, and the high school she went to, and how much her prom dress cost. (Too much, for a dance she didn’t even want to go to.) But that does not -- and never will -- make her a  _ fucking _ kook. 

“If you ever call me that again I will castrate you in your sleep,” she says, completely calm. He gets in the car, but not before giving her a curious, surprised look. He doesn’t ask, but he looks like he wants to. She hopes he doesn’t. It’s hard, on Kildare, an island so concentrated on loyalty and tribe, to live between. She’s grateful, of course, to have a better life than the kids on the Cut, and also grateful to not be ingrained into gross entitlement and privilege like those born and raised in Figure Eight. But most of the subdivision she grew up stood empty during the off-season, most of the houses rented out by rich families or leased by touron-targeted real-estate companies, so she never made friends in her neighborhood. She was too ‘stuck-up’ for the Cut kids, and ‘trash’ to the kooks. She never had any real  _ friends _ .

JJ won’t sit still on the way there. Which isn’t like, unprecedented, but it seems worse, somehow, like he’s nervous. He keeps fiddling with her aux cord, which is connected to a cassette tape, because her car is from 2002, and JJ won’t leave it the  _ fuck _ alone. Her phone is attached to it, and, ostensibly, she’s in charge of the music, but he keeps picking it up and skipping songs, never listening to something for more than twenty seconds and driving her mildly insane. He ends up skipping through all of her socially acceptable music, the palatable stuff she plays so that people won’t judge her, and gets to the weird mix of shit that she listens to when she’s alone that makes exactly zero sense. “You listen to Bob Marley?” he laughs. 

“Bob Marley is a genius,” Kiara responds defensively, snatching for her phone while trying to keep her eyes on the road. “What about it?” She needs to get the phone before he finds the One Direction and Lana Del Rey. 

“Nothing,” he chuckles, slapping her hand away. “It just --” he shrugs, flicking his head with it in a distinct gesture that’s all JJ. He moves like an action figure held together with old rubber bends, loping and bending and jerking at odd angles, like he never got used to his long limbs, never grew into or understood what to do with them. “It makes sense, that’s all.” 

“How does it make sense?” she crows, barely noticing that he’s let the song play without skipping it or complaining about it or trying to find something else. 

“You’re a super-hot rich hippie chick who likes to slum it in the Cut,” he laughs, pulling the phone away and scrolling through her playlist titles, the words rolling out of his mouth and landing like barbs in her skin, even while he’s completely unaware of what he’s doing to her. “Of course you’re a fuckin’ rastafarian.” 

“Would you  _ stop _ with that?” she pleads, and she’s trying to keep her voice light but she means it, and hopes he can tell. 

“Stop what?” he protests

“I’m not rich,” she says, trying to keep her voice even. She is, technically, comparatively, at least to him; but not like Sarah, not like her stupid ex Topper and all his stupid friends she used to have to pretend to like. 

“Kie, your dad owns the most popular restaurant on the island,” he answers, like it's obvious, like her family income is what defines her, who she is and what she values. Her intestines tie themselves in a knot at the thought of someone looking at her and seeing someone like Topper Thornton, like Kelce Smith or Scarlet Ghoray or any of their other hangers-on. “Your parents live in Figure Eight,” JJ goes on, not making it any better. 

“They didn’t always,” she admits, and he cuts his eyes at her, half-slumped in her passenger seat, one foot on the dash, the other tucked underneath him, because he’s a goblin, her phone still braced between his fingers.

“Really?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. And oh, how she’s been avoiding  _ this _ conversation. 

“My dad grew up on the Cut,” she answers, shifting uncomfortably in her seat and keeping her eyes dead-set on the road. She waits for him to be satisfied with this information and move on with the conversation. He is not. “We used to live in a subdivision,” she continues, and licks her lips, unused to talking about herself, like, ever. Everyone she knows has known her for a long time. She usually doesn’t have to have these conversations. “We didn’t move to Figure Eight til I was in high school.” Her mouth tastes coppery as she remembers the excitement, at first, about moving to a neighborhood that wasn’t built to rent out to tourons, about finally being able to fit in, to not be ignored or made fun of because she didn’t live in the right place. She was, of course, wrong.

“Huh.” It’s all he says, and it makes her itchy. 

“What?” Kiara prods, and he turns his gaze back to her phone, changes the song.

“Foot in both worlds,” he muses. “Must be tough.” The words cut a little too deep, ring a little bit too true. She’s new money, her parents barely affording the mortgage and the club fees and her high school tuition, reliant on the restaurant, fickle as it was. The pogues saw her dad as a class traitor. The kooks saw her and her family as impostors. That fucks up a kid. 

“What about you?” she deflects, because she really,  _ really _ does not want to fucking talk about this.

“What about me?” JJ scoffs, like it’s obvious, like she should know everything about him just by knowing his name. She supposes everyone else already does, that he probably doesn’t have to talk about himself much, either, just enters the conversation with his wide, easy smile and turns on his affable charm, and gets by. In a fleeting moment, she wonders how much he’s hiding. 

“How does your family feel about you living in our death trap of a house?” she asks, hands flexing on the wheel. He changes the song again, and it’s something she doesn’t recognize, with a heavy kick drum and screaming guitar. He must be searching stuff on her spotify and messing up her algorithm, the dickwad. 

“Aw.” She spares him a glance, and he’s looking at her again, false sincerity in those incredibly blue eyes, shaded by the bill of a truly heinous camo cap that’s fraying along the brim. Mischief sparkles there, too, echoed in the tuck of his bottom lip between his teeth. 

“What?” Kiara wants to smack him. Wonders if they’re friends enough for that. Wonders if they’re friends. 

“You called it our house,” he says, wiggling the knee of the leg on the dash back and forth, just a little. She knows he means it to sound sarcastic, but there’s a little bit of genuine sentiment there, hidden under all the intimacy issues and deflection. 

“I also called it a death trap,” she retorts. “You didn’t answer my question.” 

The smile falls off JJ’s face, and he goes back to fucking around with her spotify profile. “I don’t have any family,” he says, and he tries for casual, but he bites off the words, rather than his usual easy flow. Kiara’s not great at reading a room, but anyone with eyes can tell there’s something he’s not saying. 

“You must have family,” she says, and he’s quiet for too long.

“Fine,” he admits. “I’ve got family,” He changes the song. “But I don’t have any family that feels any kind of way about anything I do.” And there’s that bitter tension, again, humming just below the surface of his sunny congeniality, hinting at something darker, some deep-seated, horrible thing she has yet to unlock. She wonders if one day, he’ll tell her. Wonders if she wants him to. 

“Well,” she says, breaking the tense silence that’s settled over the car. “That’s fucking depressing.” 

He coughs out a laugh; an insincere one, but his shoulders relax. “Yeah,” he chuckles. “It is, isn’t it?” They spend the rest of the drive bickering about the music, with JJ insulting her taste at every corner but still seeming to know just about every song that popped up on her shuffle. He even played her some of the stuff he liked, and, well. Some of it is good. 

The farmer’s market is just starting to get busy by the time they get there, buzzing but not packed, and Kiara steps into the fresh morning with her canvas tote bags and a cautious, optimistic hope. She hasn’t done this for a while, not since she used to come with her dad in high school, picking up ingredients for the restaurant. He’d wake her up in the grey dawn and they’d be the first ones there, with the best, freshest pick. He would have her help decide what to buy, and, at first, she thought it was just to make her feel included, like she had some say in what would be the special for the night, following along with all of his premade decisions. But then, as she got older, she realized her dad was teaching her, encouraging her to think deductively about what they had in dry goods storage, what might sell well depending on the season, incorporating ideas from the staff -- he was training her to think like him. 

That was the first moment that crawled under her skin when her parents started nagging her about college. Why be training her to take over if they were just going to jettison her off into the atmosphere and leave her to fend for herself? Her mom seemed to have some grand future planned for her, climbing to the top of society and flourishing in a world of corporate success and glittering wealth. Big house, attractive, rich husband, 2.5 kids she would never pay attention to. The idea made bile crawl up her throat. Kiara didn’t even like the house on Figure Eight. She couldn’t imagine shopping for one, decorating it with pride, raising kids in it. Everything having to be clean all the time, dusty fake flowers and different dishes for company -- the thought makes her shudder. She’s barely settled into the Chateau, and still making it livable after it housed two teenage boys for a number of years, but so far, it’s infinitely preferable. 

The day promises to be warm, the kind of false summer preceding more weeks of rain and biting coastal wind, and Kiara ties her hair into a ponytail as JJ tumbles out of the car, his big boots landing heavy on the asphalt. “Ready?” she asks, cheerful, the smile on her face perhaps a little forced but not entirely false. 

JJ looks at her skeptically, hands shoved in the pockets of his cargo shorts. The early morning sun catches the flyaway hair escaping his cap and sets it on fire. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

She goes to Fran, first, because she doesn’t have heirloom tomatoes yet, but she will, and she needs to know that Kiara remembers her and is still a lovely, charming, and accommodating young lady. She compliments the woman’s bumper broccoli crop and buys probably too many snow peas, but they’re a good snack and if she wants Fran to put aside the good stuff, she needs to be in her good graces. She trots back to where JJ stood waiting, munching on a pea, and he looks at her in a kind of amused amazement. 

“What?” she asks, offering him the bag. 

He doesn’t take one. “I’ve never seen you smile that much,” he says. “It was scary.” 

She laughs. “Shut up and eat a vegetable, for once.” He does. 

They weave through the stands, JJ hanging back as Kiara chats with the vendors, and a few of them comment on the fact that she wasn’t with her dad earlier in the day. She shrugs, mutters something about moving out, and doesn’t catch the knowing glances several of them cast to JJ, who stares at his feet and tries really hard not to be conspicuous. (Which, for a six-foot-tall certified hottie in enormous work boots, is minorly impossible.) 

After a while Kiara drags him next to her, because he refuses to loosen up, and she casts a careful hand over crates of produce, picking out the perfect ones and making him tell her why the other options are sub-par. Slowly, he gets comfortable, and honestly, that might be worse. They round another corner, and she runs her fingers over a row of cantaloupes that have been picked too soon and are therefore useless. 

“Wow,” JJ says, bobbing his head. “Those are some nice melons.” 

She’s about to whirl on him and ask if he’s learned nothing when she sees his face, his cheeks twitching, and the way he’s avoiding her eyes. He’s making a dirty joke. She rolls her eyes, but snorts a little, too. “You’re an idiot,” she says. 

It would be funny, except he doesn’t stop. At some point, she hears him snickering, and turns around to see him holding an eggplant. Then, it’s a peach, which he makes stupid kissy noises at before biting into. The vendor gives him a dirty look, and Kiara hands him a dollar before dragging JJ away by the elbow. Finally, when he picks up a particularly large cucumber, she snaps a little bit. 

“How  _ old _ are you?” Kiara asks, crossing her arms over her chest. She misses the way his eyes drop. (Lucky for him.) JJ shrugs, and very slowly puts the vegetable down. “Is this your whole bit?” she asks, and she doesn’t know why she sounds so accusatory, so mean. She’s been having too much fun, apparently. Things have felt too light, too easy, and now she has to ruin it, the way she always does. “Do girls think this is funny?” 

“Um, no?” he responds, as surprised at her shift in mood as she is. 

“No wonder,” she says sharply. His eyebrows pull together, and he looks more concerned, than hurt. He puts his hands in his pockets. Her heartbeat ticks higher as she realizes he’s not going to pick back, not going to start a fight. Pushing flyaways off her forehead, she scrubs her hands down over her face, looks at her shoes. “Sorry,” she relents. 

“It’s okay,” his voice is measured, but also a little tight. He thinks it was bullshit just as much as she does. “The joke was dumb.” 

“I was mean,” she says, and it hurts a little to admit. Kiara doesn’t like apologizing, doesn’t like being wrong. But he was just having fun. He didn’t deserve Total Bitch Mode over a few dick jokes. “Today’s been so good, and I was --” she starts to explain, like she’s going to tell him she doesn’t trust anything good, that good days so often turn bad so she takes away the opportunity before they can. He’s too easy to talk to, this boy. “It was mean.” 

JJ’s familiar smirk tugs at his mouth, and she knows she’s forgiven. Well, she hopes she is. “A little,” he says, and she smiles at him, and her shoulders relax, and just like that, she feels okay again. It scares her a little bit, when she hasn’t felt okay in such a long time. 

A welcome distraction comes in the form of her worst farmer’s-market-enemy. “C’mon,” she says, looking over his shoulder. “one last stop.” Kie marches past him, and JJ has no choice but to follow. 

Howie Martell runs the only seafood stand at the Kildare County Farmers’ Market, and is possibly the scrawniest, most sexist, bigoted little fisherman Kiara has ever had the misfortune to meet. He also owns the only raw-foods permit for this particular open-air market because his daughter shotgun-married the Mayor’s kid a few years ago and he was granted a monopoly in return for his silence. Kiara  _ hates  _ him. 

“Morning, Howie,” she says. She’s relatively disenchanted with the concept of southern charm and hospitality, but she’s met enough passive aggressive old white ladies to mimic them perfectly. She won’t get what she wants if she’s an asshole, but she’s never been one to mask her emotions very well. 

Howie sneers. “Morning, Miss Carrera,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Kie squares up, puts her sandals shoulder-width apart, hikes her bag up on her shoulder, and crosses her arms over her chest. “Who’s your friend?” He asks. 

“This is my roommate,” she says, and goes to gesture to him, only to have her hand smack directly into his chest. She drops it awkwardly. He was standing much closer than she thought he was. “... JJ.” 

Wrinkles form on Howie’s lined forehead. “Maybank?” he asks. The gust of air that rushes out of JJ’s chest flicks Kie’s curls into each other. It’s laden with anxiety, anger and surprise. 

“What’s it to you?” JJ challenges. She’s mildly taken aback, because he’s been charming and polite to every other vendor. Maybe it connects back to his family baggage. Maybe he’s just picking up Howie’s nasty vibe. 

“Don’t sell to liars or cheats,” Howie says, and Kie can feel JJ tense up behind her. “Your old man is both.” 

JJ straightens up, bounces a little on his heels. “Good thing I’m not my old man.” 

Howie takes in JJ’s shabby t-shirt, tiny holes and rips all along the collar, the engine grease under his fingernails, the dust on his boots. “You sure about that?” 

She’s tired of this conversation, and, based on the tension radiating off the boy behind her, Howie might be in serious physical danger if he keeps talking. “What does this have to do with my shrimp, Howie?” she asks, and JJ doesn’t  _ relax _ exactly, but he seems less likely to vault himself across the shrimp cart and strangle the man. 

“Don’t think they’re yours ‘til ya pay for ‘em, Carrera.” Howie doesn’t take his eyes off JJ, who stares stonily back. 

“So how about I give you 16 bucks, you give me two pounds of shrimp, and then they’ll be mine.” Confidence is key, with this particular motherfucker. 

Howie kicks out an incredulous laugh. “16 bucks will get you one pound, maybe,” he says, crossing his own arms. 

“C’mon, Howie,” Kiara pleads, putting on her accent a little bit. She doesn’t sound like she’s from the Carolinas, not like her grandparents do, or even sometimes Sarah. But she forces it, if she’s trying to be charming. Usually when she wants something. “What do I look like, a tourist?” 

He raises an eyebrow, like he doesn’t want to answer that question. “18 bucks, pound a half.” 

That’s reasonable. That’s more than reasonable. That's the grocery store price, and this is higher than grocery store quality. But this is Howie. And he’s creepy, and annoying, and mildly unethical. And now it’s the principle of the thing. “18 bucks, two pounds.” she says. There’s a bit of a staring contest, and JJ looks between the two unlikely foes, determined 19-year-old burnout against a bitter, greasy fisherman. JJ sneaks his hand into Kiara’s bag and takes another peach. She turns to glare at him, slapping his hand, and he smiles at her, taking a large bite. 

Kiara looking away ends the standoff. “20 bucks,” Howie says. “Two pounds.” 

She sticks her hand out. “Deal.” 

Ideally, she’d wander around for a little while longer, picking up bits and bobs and a bouquet of flowers she definitely doesn’t need, but it’s been about an hour, and even though JJ claims to be nineteen, she’s pretty sure he’s actually two, because he’s lagging. After he sighs for the  _ third _ time, she relents, and they head back to the Cut. On the way, she stops for gas, and he goes into the convenience store to get snacks. When he comes back, he wordlessly hands her a caddyshack-flavored Peace Tea. 

“What?” he asks, when she doesn’t say anything or start the car. 

“How did you…” she trails off. She didn’t ask for anything. 

He shrugs, popping the tab on his peach-flavored bang. “The recycling is always full of ‘em,” he says. “I have eyes.” 

She starts the car with a quiet smile and pulls back onto the two-lane blacktop. “Should you be drinking those?” she asks, nodding to the can in his hand. 

He grins around the top of it before taking a sip. “Probably not,” he answers. 

She heads to the shower as soon as they get back, leaving JJ to put the rest of the groceries away. She knows he’s going to put things in the wrong places in the fridge, but. It makes him feel helpful. They eat leftovers for lunch, and shortly after, she starts the prep for gumbo. JJ hops up on the counter again, kicking his heavy boots against the cabinet and being a general nuisance. The energy drink hasn’t helped, but it hasn’t made it worse, either, so she assumes he must be one of those people generally immune to caffeine. He asks her what she’s making, and she explains it to him, and he warns her that John B is a pussy when it comes to spice so she should be relatively light-handed with it. 

“I’ll use you as my human guinea pig, how’s that?” she asks, rinsing the shrimp. She’s smiling, she realizes. Not for any reason, just because the afternoon is cool and sunny, and they have the kitchen window open, and JJ keeps cracking jokes at Howie’s expense because they keep making her laugh. 

“Oh, yeah,” he says, sarcastic. “Sounds great.” She laughs, and he smiles at her back. He’s quiet for a moment before reassuring her; “I have a much higher spice tolerance than John B, anyway.” 

“Yeah, okay,” she replies. “Sure ya do.” 

She permits him to help, setting him to the chopping of vegetables, chicken, and chives, showing him how to curl his fingers under on whatever he’s holding so he doesn’t hurt himself. It’s slow going, but it gives her time to do the more complicated things, and keeps him busy. Eventually, he brushes the last handful of green onions into the simmering pot and takes the cutting board to the sink. 

“So, like,” he starts cautiously, “What happened to you?” 

“Excuse me?” she asks, less indignant and more searching for clarification, because she’s getting used to his unashamed, straightforward honesty and knows he’s probably not  _ trying _ to be an asshole. 

“You were like, smart and stuff,” he says, leaning over the fridge and digging out the snow peas from Fran. “Growing up, I mean.” He pops one in his mouth and crunches obnoxiously, pushing himself up onto the counter. 

“How would you know?” she asks, surprised. She was homeschooled, up until the year before high school, when the restaurant was really starting to take off but they couldn’t quite afford public school. 

He looks mildly offended. “Mr. Gansey’s eighth grade english class?” he says, “I sat behind you.” 

“Did you?” she asks, trying to keep her voice light. Just before transferring to the public junior high she’d had -- not necessarily a mental breakdown, exactly, because thirteen year olds don’t get those -- but that’s when things had gotten bad. She doesn’t remember much of 8th grade. Or 9th. Or 10th, really, honestly, but that was different. 

“I can’t believe you don’t remember me,” he says, and throws a pea at her. “Bitch.” 

She points the dripping wooden spoon at him. “Watch it,” she says, laughing, “or I’ll put chili flakes in your eggs.” 

“I could handle it,” he boasts. 

“Sure,” she says, “Keep telling yourself that.” She stirs the gumbo, tastes it. Screws up her face and adds some more smoked paprika. 

“How do you do that?” he asks, and she looks up, surprised. 

“What do you mean?” she asks, stirring the stew but keeping her eyes on him. 

“Just taste it, and know what it needs.” He eats snow peas one by one, tries to throw one up and catch it in his mouth. Fails. “It’s like the movies.” 

“I don’t know,” she says, thinking of her dad, how she used to watch him do the same thing as a kid in the kitchen at home, how he used to tip the wooden spoon toward her, let her taste what he was tasting, have her guess what he was about to add. She turns back to the stove with a shrug. “Practice, I guess.”

“But seriously,” he says, and annoyance ticks in her jaw. If it was anyone else, hell, if it was him two weeks ago, she would have snapped at him, or maybe even left the room. 

Serious is a new thing for him. “Seriously what?” she asks, like she doesn’t know exactly what he’s talking about. She’s so sick of fielding questions about her stupid godforsaken future.  _ Yes _ , she had  _ potential _ , but that was all she ever had, and sometimes things don’t fulfill the destinies pre-written for them. She doesn’t understand why people can’t just leave her well enough alone, to her food and her ukelele and her surfboard and -- and her home. Here, on Kildare. 

“Girls like you --” He cuts himself off, does his little head shake and accompanying shoulder shrug. “I dunno. You save the world and shit.” That flips something over in her chest, some bitter regret or guilt or something with the same flavor and no name. 

“Do we?” she asks, because she doesn’t know how else to respond, how to take that compliment, if it’s meant as one. 

“Yeah, he confirms, and it’s without skipping a beat, without thinking. She would give anything to know herself as well as he thinks he knows her. They’re quiet for a minute, while Kie stirs and JJ sits on the counter, watching her deliberately not looking at him, biting her lip. “So what’s next?” 

He’s pushing, now, whether he knows it or not, and either way, she has to remind herself not to be a dick. These are questions anyone would be asking, questions everyone already  _ has _ asked her, questions she’ll probably have to field tonight at John B and Sarah’s party. “I dunno,” she says, and the irritation has to be clear in her voice. “Australia, maybe,” she answers, one of those things she says when people ask her about dreams and she has to have one on hand. 

“Australia sounds cool,” he says, but it doesn’t sound totally disingenuous, maybe like he’s not just humoring her. It sounds like he might be interested to know why, to understand the drive.

“The surf is killer,” she says, offhandedly, and it’s the first time she’s ever elaborated on the concept of travelling, someday, maybe. Usually she just says ‘Australia,’ and people stop talking. 

“You’ve been?” he asks, surprise there, and maybe envy, too. 

“No,” she admits, because this is where things get dicey, where pretending to know things about a place can be an issue if she’s talking to someone who actually knows things about the place. “but I’ve read about it.” 

“Australia,” JJ mutters, almost to himself. “Huh.” 

“You could --” She starts,  _ come with me,  _ but no, that’s too intimate, too much of a promise to make to this boy she barely knows. “go someday,” she finishes, lamely. 

“Australia? Me?” he laughs, shakes his head. “Nuh-uh, no way. I’m OBX born and bred.” He looks down at his hands, broad and rough and calloused. They’re a man’s hands, aged by years of work and broken across too many cheeks, too many noses. Not that Kiara knows, of course. All she sees is a man’s hands and a boy’s face, wonders what kind of life has built him this way. “You can take the boy out of the salt marsh, and all that.” 

_ Seriously? _ Kiara thinks,  _ This is what you want? This life?  _ But she doesn’t know what she’s headed towards, either, so she’s in no place to tell him how to live. “Alright,” she says, “I guess.” She puts the lid on the pot, turns the heat down to low. Putting her hands on her hips, she turns to face him. “Is that what you’re gonna wear to John B and Sarah’s thing?” she asks. 

He looks down at himself. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” 

She laughs, “Nothing,” she says, “but I have to get ready, and I need you to watch the pot.” 

“Right,” he says, settling back against the cabinets. “The pot.” And then, because he’s twelve, he snickers. She rolls her eyes and turns to get dressed. 

She tries on, oh, her entire closet. Even the few sundresses that hang at the back that she hates. She gives the lilac one a shot before eventually throwing on a dark red knit crop top and the same high-waisted denim shorts she wears every day. She puts her hair in two braids, lays her edges, and puts on a little makeup. After pondering her reflection for a minute, she puts on her favorite pair of adidas and keeps all of her regular necklaces and string bracelets. She gives herself a final spin before dropping her hands by her sides and sighing. She looks good. She knows that. But she looks -- well, like someone that should be at a party. Kiara can’t remember the last time she went to a party she actually had fun at. She’s always too nervous, stumbling over her words or talking too much about shit no one really cares about, or wants to listen to. Like astrology, or the pacific garbage patch. She likes parties, in theory, but there’s always an inner circle, everyone who knows each other, and the plus ones, who awkwardly try and blend in. You can guess which group she’s never been a part of. 

She grabs her charger and her keys and zips them into the backpack she always carries before leaving her room. JJ’s migrated to the kitchen floor, his back resting against the oven while he fidgets with his phone. “Jesus,” he says, “That took forev --” he stops dead when he finally looks at her. 

“What?” she asks, folding her arms over her stomach, insecurity suddenly closing in. “Do I look dumb?” 

He hauls himself up from the floor, slipping and catching himself on the counter before getting fully upright. “Um, no,” he stammers, “No, no you look --” he swallows, puts his hands in his pockets. “You look fine.” 

She lets out a breath. “Oh, good.” He doesn’t say anything else, just stands there, looking at her. Maybe she does look dumb. Maybe he’s just too nice to say anything about it. She bites her lip. “Ready?” she asks. 

Her words seem to shake him back into his body. “Um, well, shit,” he says, uncharacteristically flustered. He takes his hat off and runs his fingers through his hair. “If you look like that, maybe I should change,” he laughs, shifting his weight, curling his cap in his hands. A little bit of warmth rises in her chest, as well as a smidge of anxiety at the possibility of being overdressed. But if JJ’s changing -- maybe she’s at the normal level and he’s usually just lazy. 

Kie pulls her phone out of her back pocket. “Well,” she says, “we’ve got time.” She likes being early to things, but she knows it’s usually her anxiety talking, and there’s more than enough wiggle room for JJ to change and for them to get there. Besides, it’s fashionable to be a few minutes late, right?

He stands there another second, and it isn’t until she raises her eyebrows and spreads her hands in a ‘...well?’ kind of expression that he moves. “Oh,” he says, “Yeah, right,” he ducks his head and shuffles across the wooden floors. “Okay.” She doesn’t really know why he’s being so cagey and weird, and, based on the fact that he’s JJ, there may not really be a reason. 

While he gets ready, she tastes the gumbo one last time, deems it worthy, and takes it off the stove. Wrapping the whole thing in towels, she resolves to make JJ drive, because she doesn’t trust him to not let it spill all over her car. She grabs a ladle, makes the executive decision that Sarah probably has bowls, and fidgets with her jewelry waiting for JJ to be done. She finishes the dishes, filling the drying rack, and then leans her hands on the counter, face screwed up as she looks out the kitchen window, across the yard, overrun with weeds. She shouldn’t be this anxious about going to Sarah’s. Sarah likes her. Maybe even loved her at one point. She wouldn’t have invited her if she didn’t want her around. Also, she’s bringing food. Everyone loves the girl who brings food. Unless no one else brings food, or Sarah already has a plan for food -- why didn’t she think of that? She should have called and asked if it was okay. It’s probably okay, right? 

She fidgets with her bracelets, trying to keep her breath even and her thoughts from spiralling, biting down on her lip, willing tears not to form in her throat. This is so  _ stupid _ , this shouldn’t be this  _ hard _ . She tells herself it’s because she’s out of practice, that  _ of course _ starting to socialize again after spending the last two years of high school and the two years since essentially a complete loner is going to be difficult. But she still feels like an idiot. She’s 19. 19 year olds go to parties and hang out with their friends and have ‘squads’, right? She drops her chin against her chest. She used to be cool. This used to be effortless. What happened? 

JJ’s appearance knocks her out of her thoughts, and then, when she turns around and sees him, knocks a little bit of the breath from her chest, as well. He’s not wearing anything fancy, just a flannel over a well-fitting t-shirt and a clean, not-ripped pair of jeans. He looks good. Still has on his giant work boots, though. “Whaddya think?” he asks, with a genial grin. 

She smiles back. “You clean up nice, Maybank,” she admits. 

“Well thank you,” he says, with a sarcastic bow and a bit of a spin. It makes her laugh a little bit, and his eyes glitter at the sound. “You ready?” 

She digs her keys out and tosses them to him, and, despite his confusion, he catches them. “You’re driving.”

Ten hair-raising minutes later (she figured JJ was a risky driver but like, jesus fucking christ) they pull up to John B and Sarah’s condo. It’s toward the edge of the Cut, a definite upgrade for John B, a definite downgrade for Sarah. A symbolic compromise between the princess of Figure Eight and the Pauper from the cut. The instant Kie’s mind starts to draw a parallel, she shuts it down. The subdivision John B and Sarah live in brings back bitter memories of Kiara’s lonely childhood, and as they park, she tucks her lip between her teeth, taking a deep breath. 

“You okay?” JJ asks, glancing over at her as he cuts the engine. 

Kie wraps her arms a little tighter around the pot, still radiating heat. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s just --” she lets her words hang in the air, waiting for him to fill in the gaps. He doesn’t. “I haven’t been to a party in a while, that’s all.” It’s embarrassing, to admit that to him, especially since in the month that they’ve lived together, he’s spent every weekend out being a goddamn social butterfly. 

He laughs, and then, at her facial expression, stops. “Oh,” he says. “You’re not kidding.” 

“There’s a reason I never leave the house, JJ.” She laughs, but it’s hollow and humorless. 

“Come on,” he says, “Smart, funny, hot. You’ve gotta have friends.” He’s not looking at her, just fiddling with the key ring in his lap. She shrugs. The silence that lingers is loaded. They have familiarity, to be sure, growing every day, but not comfortable vulnerability, not yet. Maybe if she knew him better, she could have this conversation, tell him how she never had the opportunity to make friends growing up, and then never fit in, when she tried. Maybe she could tell him that at Sarah’s side, these things always felt easy, but when Kiara’s crush started becoming more obvious, Sarah drew away, and she was left on her own, again. Maybe someday, she’ll tell him all this. But not yet. 

“You think I’m hot?” she asks, and when he looks at her, a mischievous smile is growing on her face, even while she stares at the stew in her lap. She breaks, first, pressing her fingers to her mouth, and then they’re both laughing. 

“Shut up,” he says, and climbs out of the car. He comes around to her side to take the large pot so she can stand up, and then they head to the door together. 

Sarah greets them with a level of enthusiasm only a hostess can muster, ushering them in while John B stands smiling behind her, holding a beer and looking, while happy, not entirely sure what’s going on. From what Kiara knows about him, that look is usually just his default. Sarah leads them into a living room full of people, and Kiara’s stomach crawls into her throat. She recognizes the kid from Heyward’s, maybe a few others, but for the most part -- she doesn’t know anyone here. JJ detaches from the entourage to mingle, and she feels oddly vulnerable without his presence at her side. Sarah leads her through to the kitchen, where she offloads the enormous gumbo pot, and Kiara puts the stove on low, brushing her hands off on her shorts. 

“It’ll take a little bit,” Kiara says awkwardly, “To uh, to heat up again.” She doesn’t know how to act around Sarah, now. They haven’t been  _ close _ since they were fifteen, have barely talked since high school, orbiting in the same circle and never crashing together. There’s definitely still some anger, on Kie’s part, that she’s pretty sure Sarah’s unaware of. 

“Well it  _ smells _ great,” Sarah enthuses, tucking her hands behind her back and leaning against the counter. For a second, neither of them say anything, even as Sarah looks at Kie expectantly. “Well?” she asks, like the answer should be obvious. Kiara just looks at her, and her confusion must be evident, because Sarah laughs, and digs out two beers from the fridge. She pops the top on one and hands it to Kiara. “How are things?” she pushes, expectant, “With JJ? And the new place?” 

Kie misses the subtext in Sarah’s voice, the emphasis she puts on JJ’s name. Kie’s never been very good at subtext. “Things are okay,” she says around the top of her beer. And for the first time, she believes it. 

Sarah engages her in what would classify in all circles as meaningless small talk, but the enthusiasm behind it is genuine, like Sarah’s actually excited to see her, to be talking to her again. It’s strange, but not entirely unwelcome. Eventually, Sarah calls everyone in the kitchen, and bowls and mugs are taken down and passed around for people to eat. JJ gets the first serving, and gives her a hearty wink as he takes a bite. 

She drains her first drink perhaps a little too quickly, and there’s another in her hand as her praises are sung around the kitchen and Sarah leads her into the living room. Kie’s usual move is to hang out on the outskirts, stand by the wall and wait for some other socially awkward person to introduce themself so they can shit talk drunk people together. Sarah, on the other hand, drags her to the middle of the room and parks her in the center of the couch, while the entire party revolves around them. It feels a little too familiar, and Kiara copes with it by drinking heavily. 

Surprisingly, she has fun. Sarah sticks with her most of the time, only getting up when somebody needs something from the kitchen or either of them needs a new drink. JJ circulates, in and out of the kitchen and the yard, but it’s like there’s a bungee cord between them, because he keeps bouncing back to her. At some point, he bounces back with a very giggly brunette hanging off his waist. 

“Hey,” he says, smile wide, cheeks flushed. 

Kie has her sneakers kicked up on the coffee table, fourth drink in her hand, and she’s warm and comfy and there’s a cute boy sitting next to her that’s been letting her talk about hatching grounds all night so, you know, she feels pretty good. “Hey,” she says, and smiles back. The girl laughs and hides her face in the back of JJ’s shoulder, and Kie rolls her eyes. “What?” she asks. 

“Can you uh,” he says, bites his lip. His eyes are hazy and twinkling, his hair is tousled and shining under the lights. “Find a ride home?” The girl stands on her tiptoes and whispers something in his ear. Kie snorts when his eyes get big. She recognizes all the moves the girl is pulling on him as shit she’s pulled before -- boys are so  _ easy. _ The girls hands are all over JJ’s chest and shoulders, and he keeps leaning to accommodate the weight she’s putting on him. 

Kiara coughs out a laugh. “We took my car,” she points out. “So how about you give me back my keys, and --” here, she nods to the girl hanging off of him, “she can drive y’all somewhere.” 

JJ looks over his shoulder, and the girl nods and giggles and tucks her forehead against him again. “Yeah,” he says, pulling her keys out of his pocket, “Sure thing.” As soon as the keys are in Kiara’s hand, they’re gone, the girl dragging JJ out the door with a giggle Kie is pretty sure only dogs can hear. 

“Did your…” the guy sitting next to her starts. He really  _ is _ cute, with deep brown eyes and a stunning smile. “...boyfriend just leave with another girl?” 

“Roommate,” Kiara corrects, in an instant. “ _ Not _ my boyfriend.” 

“Oh,” the guy laughs. “Okay, good.” She stops drinking, after that. 

When Kiara gets home, there’s a red sedan in the gravel driveway, and music with a very steady, heavy bassline thumping out of JJ’s room. She sets the empty gumbo pot in the sink (she’d given the leftovers to John B and Sarah), deciding to clean it tomorrow, and then right as she’s about to go to her room, she trips over JJ’s flannel, and notices the clothes strewn across the floor. “Oh,” she whispers, “Oh, no no no.” 

To get to her room, she has to go by JJ’s room. To get to the bathroom and shower, she has to go by JJ’s room. If she goes by JJ’s room, she has to get closer to the faint noises coming from it that she  _ really _ does not want to think too much about. So instead, she grabs a beer from the fridge and, on second thought, the carton of blackberries they’d gotten from the market that morning. She picks up a sweatshirt from the back of one of the chairs before dropping onto the couch and turning on Gravity Falls. Loud. 

About an hour later, the door to JJ’s room swings open, and she turns up the volume on the TV to announce her presence. There’s some low talking, and then JJ appears in the hall, dressed only in pajama pants, and gathers up a jacket, top, and bra from the floor before taking a few steps back and handing them back into his room. A few minutes later, the girl appears, fully dressed, but hair a rat’s nest and makeup hopeless. JJ walks her to the door, and they have a short conversation. He doesn’t kiss her goodbye. 

Kie expects him to go back into his room, but he doesn’t, just crosses the living room and drops next to her on the couch. “Hey,” he says, completely nonchalant, like he’s not still covered in a thin sheen of sweat and she didn’t just watch his hookup leave their house. 

“Um, hey,” she responds. He takes a blackberry. “Good sex?” she asks. It feels weird, to her, but clearly he’s comfortable, so she might as well be. He’s slumped all the way down, his feet up on the coffee table, his face somewhere near her shoulder. 

“Eh,” he says, not taking his eyes off the TV. She laughs, and he flicks his eyes up at her, a cautious smile growing on his face. “Maybe for her,” he adds, and she laughs harder. 

“You’re a degenerate,” Kiara chuckles, putting another blackberry in her mouth. 

“Yeah,” he admits, “but I’m cute.” She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t say anything, just tilts the carton toward him when he goes to take another blackberry. “What, no comeback?” he says, rolling the berry into his cheek with his tongue. She keeps watching the show, but she’s smiling, holding down giggles. “Oh my god,” he says, sitting up a little with false shock in his voice, “you think I’m cute!” 

“Oh my god, shut up!” she laughs, and he falls back into the cushions. 

“That’s not a no,” he says, knocking his knee against hers. 

“In your dreams,” she shoots back, shoving it away. 

They’re quiet for a while, watching 2D teenagers worry about 2D things. It’s like three in the morning, but neither of them have to work tomorrow, and this is nice. Easy. She hasn’t had a night like this in a while, one that’s all positive, that doesn’t end with her rehashing all the shit she probably said wrong while she stares at the ceiling waiting for her brain to shut up. Well, she hasn’t gone to bed yet, but she still feels liquid, golden, like she does when things are good, when she isn’t worried every second of the day and she can still get out of bed in the morning. 

When she’s happy. 

“D’you have fun?” he asks, as an episode ends and rolls into another. She looks at him, but he’s watching the TV, his face illuminated in the dark living room. 

“I think so,” she answers, turning back. 

“You think so?” he asks, and he looks at her, now. 

She rolls a berry between her fingers, the flickering blue light reflecting off the dark, glossy skin. In the car, in the daylight, this was harder. The knowing him -- the letting him know her. But now, the late night loosens secrets from her chest, and they seem to spill from her, scattering across the messy coffee table, the dusty floor. “Sometimes,” she starts, and he reaches for the remote, turning down the TV, “I dunno.” He doesn’t say anything, won’t let her hide behind feigned ignorance of her own feelings. Or maybe he just doesn’t know what to say. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know how.” She looks at him on the last word, and he’s close, the low light casting sharp shadows across his defined features. 

“How to have fun?” he asks, and his breath puffs across her face. 

“Yeah,” she says. Swallows. She’s not thinking, not about him, or the night, or anything at all. Her mind is just -- quiet, silenced by warmth and familiarity. 

“Well,” he says, and before he turns away, his eyes drop to her lips, just for a second. Maybe. “That’s fucking depressing.” 

She laughs, loud and sharp and surprised, and the charged moment, seemingly unnoticed by either, dissipates in the dark. “Yeah,” she admits. In tandem, their heads drop against the back of the couch. He takes another berry. And then, under her breath. “Yeah, it is.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI DID U LIKE IT I HOPE U LIKED IT   
> I'm trying real hard to build a world bc idk I feel like that's what AU multichaps are for but idk if I'm being successful so if u felt immersed pls let me know   
> attempting to have the next chap up in a similar timeline?? Might be a bit longer if the length of chapters continues to increase lol. Leave me that sweet, sweet feedback!!


	3. just lean on me (when you fall)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You can come,” he says.  
> She regrets that request almost exactly twenty-four hours later when JJ opens her door just as the sun starts to rise. The light is gray and thin through her blinds, casting everything in monochrome. She’s warm, and comfortable, like a human block of cement under blankets, sinking into the mattress. The only discomforts are the air conditioning unit in her window, which is making its occasional and highly irritating loud rattling noise, and JJ.  
> ~  
> Kie and the boys take on dawn patrol, with some excellent and not-so-excellent consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello I am sorry this chapter took so long I graduated college and then I moved across the country so I've been slightly busy and worked on oneshots instead of this lol  
> also this took for-fucking-ever to write so apologies if it's choppy/incoherent, I did my best to bring it together in the end. Lots of pogue fluff awaits you, reader! dive in!
> 
> (title from Lean On Me by Daniel Shaw)

The next few weeks fall into an easy routine, the intimacy of which scares her more than anything. JJ wakes up to go to the garage, pounds on her door until she pries herself out of bed, chatters mindlessly while she makes breakfast, cleans up while she eats and remembers to be human, and then leaves with a cheery smile and the roar of an engine. It’s not like she’s given up actually teaching him to cook, but trying to control his attention span and enthusiasm around an open flame while she’s still functioning at half capacity is a task she simply isn’t up to. So she makes breakfast, and then he does the dishes before he goes to work. It’s -- nice. Constant. Gets her out of bed and makes sure she eats, even if she usually goes back to sleep after he leaves. 

She’s been opening more and more lately, so that she can start dinner as soon as she gets home and she and JJ can eat together. She won’t admit it to anyone, barely even to herself, but she likes the way he waits for her, the smile on his face when she walks in the door. It’s easier to teach after a shift anyway, when she can just sit on the counter, in the spot he takes in the morning, and direct him around the kitchen, usually eating whatever fruit or vegetable snack they bought at the market the previous weekend, challenging him to come up with the answer before she tells him. He has this way he tucks his tongue between his lips, his head tilted down, staring into thin air as he thinks. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it was adorable. 

As the weather warms up, JJ starts to surf almost every morning, barging into her room with wet hair, smelling like sweat and salt and all the best things about summer in the banks. One day, he’s bouncing his bare heels off the cabinets, munching on an apple while hashbrowns sizzle in the cast-iron, when she says; “Hey, so I’ve been thinking…” 

He tunes into her immediately. “Dangerous activity,” he says, because their banter is automatic, now, offhand. She picks a stray shred of potato off the stove and throws it at him, which he dodges easily. 

“You’ve been hitting dawn patrol more and more recently,” she comments, and he nods. He has half a grin on his face, already, because he knows what she’s about to ask him; he’s just been waiting for her to feel comfortable. 

“Weather’s finally good enough,” he responds, taking another bite of his apple and watching her through his eyelashes. She’s slowly been replacing all of his junk food with snackable fruits and vegetables, like he won’t notice. He doesn’t mind, though, because he knows where she keeps the stash she raids when she’s stoned. 

“Yeah,” she adds. “I was just --” she tucks her lip between her teeth and his hands twitch like he wants to hold her, miniscule motions neither of them acknowledge, even to themselves. She keeps her eyes on the stove, prodding the hashbrowns with a spatula. “I dunno, I was just wondering if maybe I could come with you, sometime.” He doesn’t answer for a second, and that slight delay triggers the apologies and justifications hiding behind her teeth. “I know it’s usually you and John B and Pope and if it’s like a ‘guys’ thing I don’t want to intrude, I mean, if it  _ is _ a guys thing that’s stupid and sexist, assuming girls can’t surf,” she starts taking down plates as she rambles, standing on her tiptoes (and she’s wearing tiny little sleep shorts and a tank top and no bra and  _ yeah _ he shouldn’t be looking because they’re  _ friends _ now (right?) but she’s hot, okay, sue him), “but I know that you guys have been close for a long time,”

“Kie,” he says, in an attempt to stop the flow of words. She doesn’t hear him. 

“and I wouldn’t want to barge in on  _ that _ ,” she continues, “not the whole ‘guys thing’ that was stupid --” 

“Kiara,” he repeats, and she stops, and turns toward him. He’s smiling at her, in that half-dazed way that he does, like she’s funny just by being there, and his eyes are still a little cloudy from sleep, wearing a tank top and his coveralls, only half-on, sleeves tied around his waist. He’s golden, this boy, his hair and his skin and his smile, glowing in the morning sun. 

“What?” she asks, and it comes out as a breath, a sigh, softer than she meant to, than she even knows, herself. 

“You can come,” he says. 

She regrets that request almost exactly twenty-four hours later when JJ opens her door just as the sun starts to rise. The light is gray and thin through her blinds, casting everything in monochrome. She’s warm, and comfortable, like a human block of cement under blankets, sinking into the mattress. The only discomforts are the air conditioning unit in her window, which is making its occasional and highly irritating loud rattling noise, and JJ. 

“C’mon Kie,” he says, and he’s not whispering, but he’s quiet, dressed in a thin hoodie and board shorts, hair a mess, tangled and half-squashed from sleep. “Up and at ‘em” She gives a muffled grunt and doesn’t move. “Kiaaaaara,” he sing-songs, pushing open the door the rest of the way and walking into the room. He’s silent on his feet, even across the messy floor. “Rise and shiiiiiiine.” 

“I’m going to slap you,” she mutters into her pillow. Did she ask for this? Yes. Does she want to move? No. 

“Dawn patrol, sweetheart,” he says, and the answering groan is louder this time. “You asked for it.” 

“Hard,” she answers, “I am going to slap you very, very hard.” 

“Who says I wouldn’t like it?” he asks. 

Her eyes snap open. “You’re fucking depraved,” she says. 

He smiles his signature, shit-eating grin. “Good morning.” 

JJ actually has to physically drag her, his hands around her arm, pulling until she sits up. Once she’s approximately vertical, he goes for her ankles, pulling them over the edge of the bed and dropping her feet on the floor. She’s ruffled and barely conscious, her bottom lip stuck out in the slightest of unconscious pouts, eyes squinty and hair a massive, messy pile on top of her head. “I hate you so much,” she complains. 

He wraps his hands around her wrists and pulls her to her feet. “No ya don’t,” he insists. She grunts at him. 

He nearly falls back asleep waiting for her to get ready, dozing on the couch, head tilted back against the cushions. When she finally comes out, dressed in shorts and a hoodie, she has to kick his ankle to get him to notice her standing above him. 

“Um, ouch,” he grumbles. 

“C’mon, sweetheart,” she grins. “Dawn patrol.” 

She’s expecting to meet John B and Pope at the beach, so she heads for her car as they step out into the misty morning. JJ gives her a look, and she realizes that, of course, the boys would pick him up. You can’t ride a dirt bike with a surfboard. She climbs on top of her SUV instead, and undoes the straps holding her board down. JJ doesn’t volunteer to help, and honestly, if he did, she might yell at him for it. She wrestles with the latch at the awkward angle but she’s not going to admit she needs his (frankly absurd biceps) strength for help. She gets her board down, but not without dealing with a good deal of sarcastic teasing from JJ behind her. 

A few minutes later, John B rolls up and Pope tumbles out to help them get their boards on top of the van. Pope is ruffled and smudged from sleep, his curls a haphazard mess, and he grunts a hello when she greets him. John B, on the other hand, has a wide, excited grin, calling her by name and telling her he’s glad she’s there. She respects Sarah, and her taste, and from what she’s seen, John B is a great guy. Still, he looks a little vacant behind the eyes. Like a golden retriever. Joyful and kind and beautiful, to be sure, but not a lot going on upstairs. Kie climbs into the back and watches JJ and Pope have a very intense nonverbal argument through clenched teeth with their eyebrows alone, over what she’s not sure. JJ seems to win, and he climbs in beside her. 

“Ready?” he asks, and with that smile, him and John B could be brothers. “I checked the tides, surf is gonna be sick.” He chatters the whole way to the beach, even while Pope casts inquisitive looks over the passenger seat at the pair of them and Kiara hums thoughtfully in response. 

“How very unsurprising that you’re a morning person,” Kie says as her sandals land on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, stretching her arms above her head. JJ watches the line of her, her silhouette in the rising sun, without thought, without purpose. 

Pope snorts and John B frowns where he’s perched on the side of the van, standing on the floor next to the driver’s seat in order to reach the roof. “JJ’s not a morning person,” he says, matter-of-factly. He unhooks the bungee cord and it springs back to the other side, almost hitting JJ in the face. Kie looks up at him with raised eyebrows, and he stops, eyes wide. 

“What are you talking about?” she asks, slowly, a smile spreading across her face. 

Pope answers from the back of the van, where he’s wrestling with a wetsuit. “JJ’s usually half-asleep until he hits the water,” he says, jumping and tugging at the neoprene. Kie’s got her rash guard on under her sweatshirt and is betting that Pope’s precaution is born out of an overabundance of anxiety. 

“Really?” Kie retorts, crossing her arms. “That’s…”  _ the exact opposite of the boy she makes breakfast for every morning, _ “Interesting.” 

“Not like that at home?” Pope asks, and it’s innocent enough, but that word destroys any cautious optimism or blossoming comfort she may have with JJ’s friends. Not forever it just -- pushes the door, which had been starting to open, slightly closed. She likes these guys. Maybe. They were okay, at the party, seemed funny and respectful and at least a little bit interesting but she’s not -- good, with people, exactly. She can laugh and joke with and talk to almost anyone -- she’s good at putting on a face -- but the real shit, the ease and comfort of being herself, she hasn’t known in years. 

“Easy to get up when this one’s makin’ God’s food every morning,” JJ answers for her, jumping down from the van and holding his board above his head. “Seriously. I dunno who you sold your soul to, Kiara, but tell the devil thanks, from me.” He gives her that blinding, wicked grin, one that used to feel false but now sparkles all the way up to his eyes, the same color as the dawn sky. 

“You cook?” John B asks, jumping down and hanging on the roof to look through the van at her. She nods, adjusting her backpack on her shoulder. A grin splits his face in two, similar to JJ’s, not in structure but function, like the two boys adapted to each other, like convergent evolution. “Oh  _ fuck  _ yeah,” he enthuses. “Can you make breakfast?” he asks, “like, pancakes and breakfast burritos and shit?” 

“Bro,” JJ answers before Kiara can, “best eggs you’ve ever had in your goddamn life. French toast and fancy shit, too.” Even Pope perks up at that, and they ask her a million questions about all the things she can make. She answers them with a smile, entertained by this pack of hungry pelicans and their needling, foolish conversation filling the dawn as they ready themselves for the surf. Pope takes the longest, but then they’re jogging down to the tideline, and Kie splashes in beside them like she’s always been there. 

JJ’s the first one up, because of course he is, riding like an expert, concentration mixed with joy on his boyish face. The boys hoot and holler and talk shit as he paddles back to them, and he shakes his hair out in John B’s face as revenge. Kie laughs, and Pope looks over at her, pleasantly surprised by the sound, a smile on his own face. The morning is over the horizon now, the sun shining off the water droplets on their chests and arms, making the boys look diamond-dusted in the golden light. She feels like there should be an ambient upbeat instrumental, maybe a camera crew. Surfing dawn patrol as the sun rises, all of them young and strong and happy. This is too picturesque, too idyllic to be real.

“C’mon, Kie,” JJ says, once he reaches them. (Her eyes are absolutely  _ not _ following the trickles of seawater down his sculpted chest.) “Your turn.” Her stomach flips over, not from anxiety but the ease with which the nickname falls from his mouth. He uses it more often than her actual name, now, automatic and familiar, and it always feels like champagne bubbles in her chest, warm and fizzy and a little bit strange. She paddles away from them a little bit, smiling as they whoop and clap. 

“Yeah!” John B shouts. “Let’s go, Kie!” Pope hoots and pumps his fist as a follow up and she rolls her eyes animatedly, so they can see from where they’re floating a ways away. She’s still smiling. It’s a tenuous sort of joy, cautious but blooming under her skin. She’s never had guy friends before, if she can even call them that, and this is -- nice. They’re funny, these boys, fun and easy, boisterous and distracting and bold. She likes them. She has no idea what they’d want with her.

It doesn’t take long for the right wave, and she paddles forward with natural, effortless strength, dropping into the sweet spot and hauling herself to her feet at the right moment, the familiar adrenaline surging through her as she maintains her balance, flexing her legs just so, knowing when to lean or shift her weight. When she was learning, she saw it like a fight, like she had to conquer the wave, but now, she knows better. It’s teamwork, using the force of the water in tandem with her own power, pushing them both towards the shore. She hasn’t surfed in at least a few weeks, not since her first fight with JJ, and it feels comforting, refreshing. It feels like home. 

Not wanting to paddle all the way back from the beach, she flips her board over the top of the wave and crashes into the water, indulging in the way the deep, foaming green swallows her up, smoothing over her skin and tugging at her hair. Her eyes close, and she takes a moment in the dark, cool silence before bursting through the surface. As her face meets the sun, she feels new, awake, tangible in a way she hasn’t in a long time. 

“Hell yeah!!” John B shouts, cutting through the morning air. “JJ, bro,” he crows, and as she hauls herself back up onto her board to paddle back to them, she sees him reach out and whack JJ’s shoulder. “You didn’t tell us your girl could surf, too!!” 

“Oh,  _ so _ not his girl,” Kie says as she pulls closer, and she knows she’s probably being defensive, that he probably didn’t mean anything by it, but she’s not going to fall into the ensemble cast as ‘personality: female,’ not when there’s a million more interesting things about her. John B shrugs, unaffected. 

“Aw, not like that,” he says. “I meant like,” he reaches out, loops an arm around Pope’s neck and yanks him down, screwing his knuckles into his hair. “Pope’s my boy, y’know?” he grins as Pope shoves him off before flicking water at JJ, who’s watching all of this with an inscrutable expression. “JJ, too.” JJ’s eyebrows pull together, and Kie’s glad she’s not the only one who has no idea what this kid is on about. “Y’know?” he repeats, grinning, looking to Pope for help, who isn’t any. “You guys are buddies!” 

“Buddies,” JJ laughs, and John B nods enthusiastically. “Sure, dude, whatever.” Something childish in her chest sinks, fractionally. Maybe they aren’t friends after all. It’s stupid -- John B barely knows what John B is talking about -- but she feels it, all the same. JJ shakes his head, flicking his wet hair out of his eyes, and she can’t help but watch him, waiting for any sort of signal. He catches her gaze, and winks, and she smiles, and the small anxiety dissipates in her chest as they share this small, secret joke. 

“JB, stop stalling, man” Pope says, the only one of the three boys with any semblance of tact. “JJ and Kie set the bar, get your ass over it.” 

She feels a little bad as John B paddles away -- he does, actually, look a little hurt -- but her worry dissipates quickly in the sunshine, heckling him with JJ and Pope when he wipes out. “You guys are mean,” he says, looking more petulant than any grown man has any right to be. 

“Still love us though, right?” JJ quips. It’s not a conscious thing, being excepted from the statement, but it puts her out, anyway, wiggling under her skin and bound to linger. He doesn’t do it on purpose, and the words don’t catch in her mind in the moment, but her anxiety reaches out, grabbing them and tucking them away to worry over, later. John B is smiling when he scoops his hand across the water, and JJ splutters as he gets a mouthful of saltwater. 

“Unfortunately,” John B says. 

Pope is the first one in, citing extreme, crippling hunger (JJ rolls his eyes), and Kie is quick to follow, exhausted and mildly grateful not to be the first one to cave. Her legs are burning and her shoulders ache as she body-boards back to the beach, and the helpful, annoying little voice in the back of her brain reminds her she has to work an entire shift after this, too. She’s out of practice, Pope’s wiggled out of the top half of his wetsuit, laying on his board in the sand, fingers linked on his chest, eyes closed. He opens them when she sits down on her own board, pulling at the hair tie lodged in her curls. 

“I was dry,” he complains, and she realizes that her efforts have been flicking water across his face. 

“Sorry,” she says, and he shrugs, settling back down into his apparent meditation. She works at the elastic band for a while, cussing under her breath and regretting the fact that she just threw her hair in a bun instead of braiding it like she knew she should have. At some point, Pope sits up, and when she looks at him, his hands are already halfway held out. 

“Do you…” he says, and when she makes eye contact, seems to immediately regret it. But it’s halfway out now, so he might as well say it. “Want help?” She looks at him sideways, unsure if this is an opportunity to make fun of her. He shrugs. “I have sisters.” 

She debates this for a solid seven seconds. On the one hand, she just met this guy. She doesn’t like people touching her hair. This is a trust thing, and she doesn’t know if she can trust him. On the other hand, her arms hurt and she’s going to have to carry trays for the rest of the day, so; “Um,” she says. “Sure.” 

Pope works at the knot in silence, and it’s just as horrifically awkward as she thought it would be. Luckily, they’re very shortly interrupted by John B and JJ jogging up the beach. They’re laughing and shoving each other, and even while Pope picks at her hair, Kie feels a morose kind of jealousy rise in her chest. JJ has an ease with these boys she’s never felt, a comfort derived from too many afternoons spent at each others’ sides. There is no need for words between them, not when they’ve seen all the same things, learned the same lessons from the same experiences. They know each other as brothers do, a kind of understanding she will never know. 

“Dude, what the fuck?” JJ asks, looking oddly put out. There’s almost an edge to his teasing tone, the spark in his blue eyes gone in favor of a wary suspicion. It’s odd, just enough for Kie to wonder why. 

“Yeah,” John B adds, taking his characteristic bandana off and wringing it out into the sand. (Why he didn’t just take it off before they got in the water, Kie doesn’t know.) “I thought only chimpanzees groomed each other as a bonding ritual.” JJ turns his confusion on John B, instead, and John B shrugs. “What?” 

Pope finally extricates the ponytail holder and hands it back to Kie. “She needed help, you fucking weirdos,” He says. JJ’s shoulders drop half an inch, and she thinks he was probably worried Pope was crossing some sort of boundary, assuaged by the fact that she was alright with it. 

Kie works her hands through her hair, attempting to pull it into some semblance of a braid. “If you’ve never detangled a ponytail post-surf you’re not allowed to have opinions on this,” she adds, and Pope looks pleased to have her backing him up. His friendly smile puts a warm feeling in her chest, and it’s hard not to mirror it as she looks up at John B and JJ, who are now debating how normal it is to make wildlife documentary references in every day conversation. The argument ends when JJ shakes out his hair, spraying all of them with seawater, and there’s various noises of annoyance and overlapping profanity. 

“ _ Jesus _ JJ!” John B shouts, but he’s laughing, and JJ is too. 

“Like a fucking  _ dog _ \--” Pope mutters, and hauls himself to his feet, offering a hand to Kiara, who does the same. 

The boys hassle and tease each other as they walk back to the van, and Kie follows with a quiet sort of contentment, happy to listen as they toss empty insults back and forth. JJ falls back when he notices her silence, letting Pope and John B pull ahead. “Hey,” he says, and it’s quiet, kind, and just for them. 

“Hey,” she says back, and bumps her shoulder into his. His skin is scalding, even spattered with seawater in the chill, golden morning. He radiates heat, glowing like an open flame, or the sun. 

“You good?” he asks, blue eyes cautious and hopeful. 

She nods, watching their feet trod side-by-side in the sand before looking up at him, and the smile on her face is full and shining, and, finally, honest. “I’m great,” she says. 

It’s barely 7 as they pull into the Chateau, and John B groans about how hungry he is as he helps JJ unstrap their boards, one eye on Kiara, who gets the message and invites both him and Pope in for breakfast. She makes breakfast burritos, because John B had seemed unreasonably excited about them, heating up the leftover hashbrowns from the previous day and starting some bacon on the stove. She can tell JJ wants to help -- to show off what he’s been learning -- so she sets him to making the eggs, with cheese and peppers, lining up the seasonings on one side of the stove. 

She leans across him at one point to turn down the heat, and as she pulls away, she catches his gaze, a broad smile on his face. “What?” she asks. 

He shrugs, his shoulder-hitch head-shake combo that’s become so familiar. “Nothin’” he says, looking back down at the pan and giving the eggs a poke with the spatula. The smile doesn’t move from his face. 

“Ay yo, Masterchef!” John B calls, and both Kiara and JJ turn around. “ETA on the burritos?” 

JJ responds first, pointing the spatula at John B. “You want them so bad, come make ‘em yourself,” he calls, and John B flips him off. “Careful there, asshole,” JJ taunts, without heat. “Or I’ll put chili flakes in your eggs.” Kie smacks him, a smile on her face, as he mimics her threat from the other day. JJ snickers and gives her a mischievous wink. 

“I could handle it,” John B says from where he’s sat at the counter between the kitchen and the living room. 

“Sure you could,” Kie and Pope chorus, and Pope gives her a broad grin. 

The boys fall on the food like seagulls on a tourist’s spilled lunch, taking seconds and thirds. John B talks with his mouth full and Pope laughs as he tries to throw shreds of hashbrowns into JJ’s mouth. Kie yells at them to quit it without any real malice, and when they’re done, she makes Pope sweep up. Finally, JJ heads for the shower and the other two boys spill out the door, stopping to thank her on the way out. 

“Breakfast was killer, Kie,” John B says, pulling on his sweatshirt and flipping out the hood. “Seriously.” 

“Thanks!” she says, biting down on the beaming smile that takes over her face. Her chest is so full she feels it might burst, appreciation for their presence and their praise feeling like sunbeams shining out from between her ribs. The fact that they’ve all seamlessly accepted and adopted JJ’s nickname for her makes her feel warm, accepted. Part of something. 

“Best I’ve had in a long time,” Pope adds, and then looks immediately concerned. “Do _ not _ tell my mom I said that.” John B and Kiara laugh, and John B heads for the driver’s side of the van. Just before they get in, Pope turns around to look at her where she’s standing in the doorway. “See you tomorrow?” he asks. 

“Absolutely,” she answers. 

The smile won’t leave her face as she cleans up, stacking the plates in the sink and filling the egg pan with warm, soapy water. She can’t remember the last time she had so much fun. Her friends the first two years of high school were… fine. It was mostly Sarah she wanted to spend time with, anyway, and when it was just the two of them she felt like they could take on the world. But the rest of the time it was always shopping or gossip or mani-pedis and never surfing or cooking together or anything else she liked to do. She always felt separate from them, like an unwanted guest, somebody’s cousin, invited along as an obligation. Those girls cut her sideways glances as they talked about ‘dirty pogues’ and ‘the stinking south side,’ and not once did Sarah stand up for her. The bitter memories make this particular morning shine in comparison, and while Kiara aches for the girl she once was, she feels grateful for the three ridiculous boys and the way they accepted her into their ranks. 

JJ comes back into the kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a towel, usual uniform of white tank and half-on coveralls making her mouth go dry. “Hey,” he says, tossing the towel across a chair. “Boys leave?” 

She nods, and then points at the towel. “Not there,” she says, and he groans, and this is familiar, too, JJ always a hurricane, Kiara attempting to keep him in check so he might, one day, learn to clean up after himself. 

He leans around her to look at the clock on the microwave. “Shit,” he says, “I better get gone.” He scrambles around the living room, digging through the couch for his keys until she picks them up from the counter and jingles them at him. “Thanks,” he says, and his smile is slouching, easy, open and trusting without knowing what it is. 

“You’d lose your head,” she reminds him, and he shrugs. 

“That’s what I’ve got you for.” It’s said as a simple fact, like he doesn’t know what he’s just said to her, doesn’t understand how he’s just opened her chest and made himself a home there. JJ’s been weaseling closer ever since she moved in, so easy to like, charming and funny and filled with a graceful ease in conversation. She still doesn’t feel like she knows him, not with so much unsaid, but they rely on each other, all the same. He takes the keys from her outstretched hand and breezes past her toward the door. 

Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s chasing after him, catching his arm before he gets through the door. “Hey --” she says, and he stops dead. Her hand is around his bicep, long, slender, elegant fingers dark against smooth, young skin, tan and stretched over taut muscle. His eyes drop to the point of contact before meeting hers, clear and blue and shining. She’s caught in them for a split second, like looking at the sun shining off the sea, struck blind by the glare. “Thanks,” she finishes, lamely. 

His eyebrows draw together the slightest amount, the ever-present JJ half-smile still perched on his stupid, beautiful face, and it almost makes her want to laugh. “For what?” he asks. 

She shrugs, and he can’t think about anything except the fact that she’s still touching him. “Today,” she says. 

He smiles, full and real. “Yeah,” he says, “you had fun?” She nods, tucking her lip between her teeth, not noticing how JJ follows the motion. “Finally learning how, then?” he asks, and she pinches him with the hand still on his arm, laughing as he winces dramatically.

“Go to work,” she says, shoving his shoulder. 

“Home for dinner?” he asks, taking another step down the front stairs, the heat of him leaving her space. She crosses her arms over her stomach, her shoulder propping open the front door. 

There’s that word, again. “Always,” she answers. 

Dawn patrol becomes somewhat of a routine, as well, Kie climbing into John B’s piece of shit van a few times every week. Sometimes it’s all four of them, when Pope is home from college on the weekends, but mostly just her, John B, and JJ. Pope jokes once about being replaced, and John B laughs and tells him they might, if he’s not careful. She asks about Sarah, once, when they’re floating in a loose pod, waiting out a lull. 

“Sarah doesn’t surf?” she asks.

John B answers with the air of a man who has seen some shit. “I tried to teach her once,” he answers, and doesn’t finish, his eyes far away and mildly scarred. 

“Didn’t go well,” JJ fills in. 

She doesn’t ask again. 

She doesn’t know exactly at what point she starts feeling like an actual part of the crew, or, ‘the Pogues’ as JJ calls them. It might be the first time John B ties a colorful string bracelet around her left wrist, or when JJ abandons calling her ‘Kiara’ at all and uses her nickname full time, or when Pope starts looking at her like she’s the camera in the Office when John B or JJ says something stupid, just to make her laugh. Before she even notices, April slips into mid-May and Pope is home for the summer, joining them every morning and adding to every moment of chaotic hilarity. Summer nears, and even Pope loses his wetsuit as the weather warms up.

One morning, Kiara is helping John B tie the boards to the roof when she notices a bank of clouds to the north that’s dark and growing ominous. “Are we worried about that?” she asks, nodding at them. 

John B checks over his shoulder, and mild concern shuffles sleepily across his face before he shrugs. “Probly fine,” he answers. A story about this self-same boy surfing a  _ hurricane surge  _ echoes in the back of her mind, but JJ’s completely unconcerned and Pope looks passively interested in the clouds, cautious, but not worried, so, since she puts the most faith in his judgement, of the three of them, she figures it’s alright. 

It’s raining by the time they get to the beach, but only lightly, and the air is still humid and warm. Kiara’s not about to complain. If there’s anything that will be the death of her, it’s her pride, and she doesn’t want the boys to think she’s a fair-weather surfer. She pulls on her rash guard and twists her hair into a braid, eyeing the sky. JJ sidles up next to her, dressed in just his board shorts because it’s highly probable he doesn’t ever feel the cold. 

“What’s with the face?” he asks. She nods toward the building storm, and JJ shrugs. “Nothin’ we ain’t seen before.” She raises her eyebrows, and he nudges her shoulder with his, warm against her goosebumps. “Remember the first time we surfed together?” he asks, and she nods, surprised he’s bringing it up. “Those clouds looked about the same.” 

“Wasn’t raining then,” she cautions, and he smiles, easy and real. She doesn’t know how it always eases her worries, smoothing her frazzled nerves in an instant, but it does. 

“You’ll be fine,” he promises, and, like an idiot, she believes him. 

It’s still only drizzling as they paddle out, but both Kiara and Pope keep one eye on the ominous clouds, JJ and John B either oblivious or uncaring, pulling the same stupid stunts and attempting the usual impossible tricks, even as the water darkens and roils. At one point, lightning flashes across the sky, and Kie whips around to look at Pope, floating a few feet away. 

“I saw it,” he says. 

“Do you think...” she starts, because she doesn’t have to finish her sentences, now, for any of them to know what she means. It’s something she does without thinking, no longer surprised or scared by the intimacy inferred. They wait, but there’s no thunder. Pope shrugs, and Kie puts it in the back of her mind, resolving to exit the water at the slightest rumble in the sky. 

The surf is, in fact, pretty fucking sick, every other wave towering overhead, the dark water thrilling and threatening at the same time. The weeks of dawn patrol have refreshed her muscle memory and honed her legs and lungs, and she keeps up easily, now, at least with John B and Pope. JJ is still the best, by unanimous opinion, even though none of them will ever admit it. Even while the storm lurks at the corner of her vision, Kiara loses herself in the cool rain, the merciless spray and sting of the angry ocean. There’s something tangibly cathartic about conquering the rage and frustration beneath her board, shoving it down and forcing it forward, using it to propel herself, fast and unstoppable, toward the shore. 

Her sense of youthful immortality is cut short by a prideful, overconfident attempt at a wave that’s too large and too fast, surging up underneath her in a way she’s not prepared for. She doesn’t shift her weight in time, and green water rushes over the nose of her board, flipping the tail up and her off and into the water. She throws her arm out on instinct, even when it will do nothing to break her fall, and it hits the water at exactly the wrong angle, wrenching her shoulder back and sending pain shooting through her back and side. Just before she hits the water, she thinks she hears JJ call out her name. 

The impact knocks the air from her lungs, exploding in a large bubble toward the surface, and the storm makes the water dark and impenetrable, surrounding her in an airless, black embrace. Her lungs scream, her head pounding, and she paddles upwards, desperate for breath. She only gets half a second above the water before another wave slams into her, and she tumbles toward the bottom, feeling the leash to her board slip off her ankle. Her arms windmill desperately, even as her right shoulder cries out with pain, and water fills her mouth as her head breaks the surface, attempting to cry for help. She chokes and splutters, attempting to tread water before another wave crashes around her, pushing her down again. 

The edges of her vision cloud and her head feels like it’s about to explode. Nothing seems real, like she’s stuck in a nightmare, scrambling in an endless, freezing void. She’s a strong swimmer, always has been, was never afraid of something like this until now. Her feet touch sand, and she shoves her legs into the bottom, rocketing upward, reaching out with her good arm, desperate for the chill, stinging air, for the wind on her skin and the electricity brewing above her and her friends. She chokes in another breath, feels herself sinking again, desperation building in her chest, and just before she slips under the water, a hand wraps around hers, and she’s being pulled up and to the side. 

It’s JJ, his eyes wild with fear, repeating her name in a low, terrified voice. “ _Fuck,_ Kie, holy _fucking shit_ are you okay?” He pulls her onto his board, her legs still dangling in the water, and they rock dangerously as the wind picks up and the waves wrap around and wash over the board, like hands trying to drag her back down. She’s shaking and coughing. Without warning, she braces one hand on his knee and leans over, vomiting seawater. “Oh _fuck_ ,” he says, “Oh god, you’re not okay, you’re _so_ not okay -- JOHN B!” He slips off his board, and she clutches at him, his wet skin slipping through her grasp. 

“Stay here, Kie, stay on the board,” he says. “Just hold on, it’s okay, I’m gonna get you back to shore, you’re gonna be okay.” He’s calling to John B over the storm, pulling the board behind him as he swims toward the beach, and she’s too preoccupied focusing on pulling in a breath that doesn’t hurt to hear what he’s saying. She thinks she hears Pope’s name and more yelling, chopped into pieces by the wind. She clings to JJ’s board as he pulls her toward the beach, and then he’s lifting her up, one arm under her knees and the other around her shoulders, jogging toward the tideline. Just after he sets her down in the sand, she leans forward, throwing up more saltwater between her knees. 

“Oh god,” he’s saying, “Oh shit, okay, can you breathe? Kie, can you hear me?” She coughs again, a deep rattle in her chest, and the next breath doesn’t hurt as much, her head starting to clear as oxygen finds its way back into her blood. She’s vaguely aware of his hands on her face, pushing her hair back behind her ears, and then her chin is being lifted and his eyes are staring into hers, the same color as the angry sky, blue-grey and filled with consuming worry. 

She nods, and a laugh falls out of him, humorless and relieved. Chest heaving, she wraps her arms around herself, tears falling of their own accord, tasting like fear and embarrassment and gratitude. She feels herself shaking, realizing that she’s never felt colder in her life, every breath shaky as they fight their way in and out of her body. There’s the sound of feet pounding in the wet sand, and she can hear Pope and John B above her, see their feet in the edges of her vision. JJ’s kneeling in front of her, one hand on her face and the other on her shoulder, and she’s staring at his knees, her chin tucked into her chest, knees bent as her body tries to conserve heat as much as possible. 

“I’ll, um --” John B says, looking at her, frozen in indecision before an idea washes over him and he’s bouncing, half-turned away already. “I’ll get water! And the first aid kit! From the van!” 

“Grab a blanket!” JJ shouts after him. “And a sweatshirt or something!” John B’s confirmation is lost to the wind, and JJ’s hands are rubbing up and down her arms, his eyes still on her, like he can’t look away. Kiara just breathes, her mind still lagging, her eyes distant as she looks across the ocean that almost killed her. 

“I’m okay,” she says, small and weak, and JJ visibly relaxes at the sound of her voice. “I’m good, I’m okay,” she repeats, but the words are said through chattering teeth, and his gaze is soft and disbelieving. 

“I would believe you Kie,” he says, and his teasing smile is for her benefit, trying to put her at ease, even while there’s real worry in his eyes. “But your lips are literally blue.” He leans forward, putting his lips on her forehead to sense her temperature, and she can’t tell if she’s shivering from the cold or from his touch. “ _ Fuck _ ,” he says, pulling away, and then, looking up at Pope, “She feels like ice, man.” 

Pope hasn’t moved, just looking at the two of them, chest fluttering rapidly, hand held out like he doesn’t know what to do with them. “What do we do?” JJ’s asking, and she hears Pope spluttering, panicked, and then JJ repeats himself, cold and stony in a way she hates. “Fucking  _ hell _ , Pope, what do we  _ do _ ?” 

“Body heat!” Pope cries, finally. “She needs to get warm.” JJ shrugs, his hands still moving, and Pope elaborates. “Skin-to-skin contact warms the fastest.” 

Before she knows he’s moving, JJ’s behind her, his broad chest pressed to her back, wrapping one arm across her collarbones, the other around her waist. She holds onto his forearm with one hand, careful with her tender shoulder, dropping the other to tangle her fingers with the ones at her waist. She closes her eyes, pressing her cheek against his elbow, breathing deep, grateful for the way the cold air scrapes the inside of her lungs, mostly focused on not throwing up again. JJ rocks her gently back and forth, and she can tell he’s keeping his breathing slow on purpose, to try and keep her calm; but she can feel his heart hammering against her back, and she knows she wasn’t the only one who was terrified. 

John B appears with a blanket and a grey sweatshirt, and JJ peels away from her to let her put it on. Once she tugs it down over her hips, his arms come back around her instantly, and Pope is wrapping the blanket around both of them, John B essentially shoving the water bottle into her hands. JJ drops his forehead to her shoulder as she drinks, his heartbeat finally slowing, and lets out a breath. Pope and John B watch her nervously, both sets of brown eyes wide and concerned, and they both look so young, open and terrified. 

She swallows a large mouthful, and when she speaks, it’s louder, even though her voice still sounds hoarse and wrecked. “I’m okay, you guys,” she says. “Really.” John B and Pope relax, at least a little bit, but JJ’s grip on her tightens, almost imperceptibly. 

“You disappeared, dude,” John B says, attempting to keep his voice light, the sentiment in his lower register betraying the levity. “I turned around and you were gone.” He’s bouncing on his toes, his eyebrows drawn together, like he wants to help more but doesn’t know how. 

“You’re lucky JJ saw it, Kie,” Pope says, and his voice is even and low, never one to make light of a serious situation. “I didn’t even know you’d gone down til I heard him shouting.” 

Kie turns in JJ’s arms as best she can, and his eyes, dear and blue and wide, are still soft, open and honest, even as the rest of his face arranges itself into controlled emotion. “You were watching me?” she says, and it comes out softer than she means to. 

“Watching you wipe the fuck out?” he asks, and even though he’s making fun of her, it makes her feel better, somehow. “Yeah,” he says, “I wouldn’t ever miss that.” She nudges an elbow into his stomach and he pretends to be hurt, just as thunder rumbles across the sky. 

“Okay yeah,” Pope says, “Time to go.” 

John B jogs down the shore to find her board and JJ untangles himself from her, faking shivering as he loses both the blanket and the heat of her. When he goes to pick her up, she smacks his arm and points at him from underneath the blanket. 

“Absolutely fucking not,” she says. 

John B jogs up with her board triumphantly and with a wide, proud smile that reminds Kiara of a little kid finding a particularly large stick. “Got it!” he says, and the sky flashes again. Pope picks up his board and looks nervously between the sky and Kie, like he’s blaming himself for not getting them out of the water sooner. 

“C’mon guys,” Pope says, “Before we get struck by lightning.” 

John B carries her board, which normally Kie would balk at, but she’s got one hand holding the blanket around her and the other holding the water bottle, so she doesn’t mind. All three boys keep throwing glances at her as they march back to the access point, and she rolls her eyes. “Look at it this way,” she says, and they all tune in, a little too closely. “I'm still a better surfer than Pope.” 

JJ throws back his head and laughs, and John B shoves Pope’s shoulder, saying “She’s got you there, bro!” Pope rolls his eyes, and, with that, the tension is broken. She shivers all the way back to the van, and even when the heat is blasting and they’re back on the road. Buried in the blankets and a hoodie that’s definitely not hers and smells familiar, she hopes none of them notice. 

The rain picks up during the short drive, and by the time they get back to the Chateau it’s pouring. They leave the boards on top of the van and sprint for the house, Kie with the blanket over her head, the boys whipping off their shirts and running through the rain, whooping like hooligans. Inside, she flicks the switch for the kitchen light, and nothing happens. 

“Fuck,” she says, and then, as JJ appears next to her. “Power’s out.” He has his shirt half-on, still speckled with rain, and he sighs, and hauls it off. 

“I’ll go check the breaker box,” he says. 

Pope shuffles up between them, flicking water from his hair and over both of them. “No need,” he says, holding out his phone, showing a text conversation with his dad wherein Heyward is complaining about the ‘bitchass powerlines from the no-good power company.’ “Out all over the island.” 

“Hell yeah!” John B says, breaking through their small huddle and throwing himself, still mostly wet, across the couch. “Day off!” Then, sitting up and looking at them with wide, enthusiastic eyes, “Hey, you guys wanna build a fort?” Kie can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. She shoos him off and towards the bathroom. 

“Get dry before you soak through the couch,” she says. 

John B heads for the shower like he still lives there (which, she supposes, makes sense) and Pope wanders off to call his dad from the screened-in porch. Kie throws off the blanket and digs her phone out of her backpack, which she’d pulled on in the van and then covered on the mad-dash inside, leaving her looking like a turtle. There are a couple texts from both her parents, worrying about her safety (her dad knows she’s become a regular with dawn patrol) and telling her they’re running a skeleton crew at the Wreck, and not to worry about coming in. With the influx of college kids home for the summer and high schoolers looking for their first summer job, they have enough staff to choose from, and Kie’s dad does his best to look like he’s not playing favorites. 

She’s texting them back to say she’s fine and thanks for letting her know when JJ appears at her side, looking over her shoulder. She doesn’t know exactly when JJ completely gave up the premise of personal space, only that at some point she was accepted into the inner circle of people allowed to touch him, and, since then, never known peace. It’s as endearing as it is annoying, a sign that he trusts her, that she doesn’t count as ‘other people,’ which he regularly expresses his hatred of. 

( _ “I fucking hate people,” _ he’d said once, upon arriving home from a shift at the garage.

_ “Even me?” _ she’d asked from the kitchen, where she was chopping vegetables for dinner. 

_ “You don’t count as people” _ he’d said, a softness in his eyes she was unaccustomed to and hadn’t seen since.

_ “Gee, thanks,” _ she’d said. “ _ Take a shower and get your ass in here to help me.”  _ and the moment was over)

“You okay?” he asks, and when she turns to look at him, he’s a little…  _ close _ . She realizes it before he does, jerking her head back, and he takes half a step out of her space, looking embarrassed. 

“Yeah,” she says, and it’s softer than she means to. 

“No, but like --” he starts, and then he looks at her, and some part of him seems to fall apart. “Really, though.” 

“JJ,” she says, and it’s half exasperated laughter, endeared as she is by his concern. “I’m okay.” She’s shaken up, to be sure, but she’s taken, well, not  _ worse _ falls, but bad ones, and the way they all centered themselves around her, worried themselves scared and did anything they could to help -- it made her feel included and valued in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. “I promise.” 

He looks at the floor, shoulders tense and face red, his damp hair hanging down and obscuring his eyes. His voice is thick when he speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says, so quietly that at first she thinks she hasn’t heard him correctly. But then, “I’m really fucking sorry, Kie.” She’s lost at first, but then the realization washes over her -- he’s blaming himself. He had promised her, when she was worried about the darkening clouds, that she would be alright. 

“Fuck, JJ,” she sighs, and without thinking, she’s reaching for him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and leaning towards him on her tiptoes. “You basically saved my life,” she says. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He’s stunned for a moment, and then his arms come up around her waist, and his forehead drops to her shoulder, and hot tears soak through the sweatshirt to her skin. 

“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I should have --” 

She pulls away, and he sniffs, trying to look like he hasn’t just been crying. Taking his face in her hands, Kiara pushes aside tears with her thumbs, his forehead wrinkled, his lips tight, like a little boy pretending to be brave. “It’s not your fault,” she says. His eyes are downcast, glassy and full. She can almost feel the shame rising deep in his gut, so clear and plain on his face. “Hey,” she says, “look at me.” Reluctantly, he does. “I’m an adult,” she says, “I looked at the storm and got in the water anyway.” He bites his lip and looks away again, and she lifts his face slightly, making him look her in the eye. “You did, too,” she reminds him, “and it just as easily could have been you, you dumb motherfucker, so quit blaming yourself for shit that isn’t your fault.” 

JJ chokes out a laugh, and she expects him to shove her off, but he doesn’t, just tilts his face into her touch. Kie watches him, seeing for the first time the kind of man JJ really is, underneath the bravado and the banter, all the big jokes and ploys to be the loudest, funniest one in the room. He  _ cares _ , so much, for all of them, would rather die than see anything happen to her, or John B, or Pope. Pushing forward, he wraps her in his arms again, and she smooths her fingers over his hair, grateful for his warmth and his proximity. She relaxes into his grip and thanking him, silently and from the depths of herself, hoping he can feel her gratitude in the way she holds him, because she doesn’t have the words. He mumbles something into her shoulder, and she tries to pull away, but he keeps his arms tight around her.

“What?” she asks, and he pulls away from her, eyes still brimming with tears but sparkling with that familiar, charming mischief. 

“Couldn’t have been me,” he repeats, and her eyebrows draw together, smiling as he does. “I wouldn’t have fallen off my board.” She shoves his shoulders away from her, and he laughs and lets his hands fall. An unconscious part of her misses his touch, his warmth, the way she fit into his arms. 

“Shut the fuck up,” she laughs. “You’re making breakfast.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol you really thought I could write a whole chapter of fluff? nope, had to get ya, right there at the end. Don't worry though! next chapter has a kitchen dance party and more bonding!! Also Sarah!! No promises on timeline -- I'm redoing my room and applying for jobs and writing other fics and working on a super secret OBX fan project that will be revealed on tumblr soon that I promise you guys will love. Anyway, thanks so much for reading and please do leave me that sweet, sweet feedback. I am in fact a cave-dweller and it is my only taste of the outside world. (Kidding. Mostly. Quarantine, right? anyway, see y'all soon!)


	4. when you're with me (no judgement)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kitchen dance parties, golden afternoons, and some tears. All in a day's work for JJ, Kiara, and the rest. 
> 
> title from 'no judgement' by Niall Horan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi yes hello this took forever again oops   
> also while I was writing it I kept thinking it was gonna be shorter than the other chapters and then I was ~very wrong about that~  
> pls don't hate me for 10.6k of fluff, angst, and the Sarah & Kie reconciliation the Pates are Too Manly To Write Properly

One Monday morning, Kiara wakes up to the sun, rather than JJ’s persistent knocking. It’s a pleasant surprise, really, to wake up to chittering birds rather than an annoyingly cheerful teenage boy, but she’s still confused as she creeps into the kitchen, waiting to be ambushed; a jump scare is his idea of a fun joke. He’s gotten her a few times, nearly falls over laughing every time she jumps a foot in the air -- at least until she comes for the ticklish spots on his sides -- the ones only she knows where to find. She’d done it in front of John B and Pope, once, when they’d come to pick Kie and JJ up for dawn patrol, and Pope had looked alarmed and John B utterly delighted when JJ had screeched and jerked away from her. He’d spent the rest of the van ride with his arms crossed over his stomach, and then running from John B across the beach as the latter cackled, hands outstretched. 

JJ hasn’t quite forgiven her for that, and has taken to hiding around every corner, so she’s careful as she scouts a path and then hurries into the kitchen, bare feet light and quiet on the wood floors. Once she feels securely installed in the sunlit space, she picks up her Bluetooth speaker from it’s permanent place on the counter and starts it up, swinging her hips as she starts up her bubblegum-pop morning playlist, empty, vapid songs meant to make her dance and feel better about her day. She cracks eggs and whisks in seasonings, manning two hot skillets with expert skills, bobbing her head and singing along. It’s Shawn Mendes and Lauv and One Direction (group  _ and _ solo songs) -- all the stuff she’d never,  _ ever _ cop to listening to. 

Kie has a certain degree of pride when it comes to her music, a level she likes to maintain, especially being such an avid Marley fan. Men are always trying to take her credibility from her, claim she ‘doesn’t know what real music is’, and she fights hard to be respected when it comes to this aspect of her life. She has a secret dream of becoming a recording artist, herself, but her parents conditioned her out of believing it could ever be a feasible career. Still, she plays her ukulele all the time, has a hidden notebook of songs and a recording mic on her Amazon wish list. JJ hasn’t heard her yet, at least, as far as she knows, and she’d like to keep it that way. 

It’s an odd fear to have, for an aspiring singer, or almost one, but she doesn’t let anyone hear her sing, not even her parents. She sang for Sarah, once, when they were 14 and she still trusted her. Sarah took a video, and even though she didn’t post it anywhere, the existence of it nags at the back of Kiara’s mind. She doesn’t even know Sarah still has it, but she thinks about it sometimes, anyway. 

She thinks JJ’s at work, left early for the shop. Maybe the waves were shit, maybe he didn’t wake up in time -- maybe he just forgot to get her up. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Whatever it is, she assumes he’s gone, dancing around the kitchen and singing at the top of her lungs to ‘No Judgement’ by Niall Horan. 

“When you’re with me no juuuudgement,” she jams, mixing together pancake batter and making eggs at the same time. It’s her day off -- she’s in the mood to get fancy. “We can get that from everyone else,” she turns off the heat and takes the eggs off the stove, pouring pancake batter into the other hot, waiting pan. “We don’t have to prove nooooothin’...” She sets the bowl down and goes hunting for chocolate chips, wiggling her fingers as she looks around, sure she got them out already, dancing along to the next line. “We can just be! Our! Selves!” Not finding the chocolate chips, she decides on blueberries instead, and turns to the fridge -- only to see JJ leaning against it. “FUCK!” 

He laughs as she stumbles backward, one hand held to her chest, attempting to breathe as he stands, there shirtless again, the asshole, grinning at her, hands tucked in the pockets of his grey sweatpants. “Good morning,” he says. 

She falls against the counter, pointing at him with the spatula, which she’s also thinking about hitting him with. “You suck,” she says, breathless. 

He shrugs. “Sometimes,” he says. She gives him a look. It’s not shocking, that JJ might be bi -- she just never really thought about it. All he does is grin, so she narrows her eyes and scrunches her forehead at him before turning back to her breakfast. She plates the eggs and shoves it at him. “Aw,” he says, taking the plate and hopping up onto his usual spot on the counter. “You made me breakfast?”

“I made  _ me _ breakfast,” she says, flipping the pancakes and dragging the egg pan back onto the burner. “I thought you went to work.”

He reaches between his knees to pull a fork out of the drawer and shovels a bite in his mouth. “Day off,” he says, through eggs and cheese. She shoves at his knee. 

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she snipes, and he swallows exaggeratedly. 

“Didn’t I tell you?” he says, tapping the tines of the fork against his lips -- it’s a tick of his, a fidget, or a nervous habit, or whatever. She doesn’t think he knows when he’s doing it, but she’s seen it a million times, while he thinks or teases her or listens to her talk about nothing and everything all at once. It’s a part of him, the same as his impossibly blue eyes and the way he shrugs while shaking his head. 

“You never tell me anything,” she says, which is true about more than his schedule. They’ve been living together four months now, and she still feels like she barely knows anything about him. She knows  _ him _ \-- the way he likes his coffee, the shows he likes and how many times he checks to make sure he locked the door every night, but not anything  _ about _ him. He could have siblings, both parents or none, could be fine being a mechanic or planning to take over the world. She’s gathered that he’s been friends with John B since forever, with Pope since middle school. But he’s never talked about his family or his past, or even his future. There’s still so many missing spots, even as his presence beside her feels like second nature. 

“I definitely  _ thought _ about telling you,” he says before taking another bite, and she laughs. 

“That sounds about right,” she laughs. 

Kiara tries to hold back, now that JJ’s in the kitchen, but she finds it hard, as the speaker keeps pumping out upbeat pop, to keep still, to keep from singing along. She bobs her head and whispers the words under her breath, looking up at some point and finding him staring at her. 

“What?” she asks, trying not to let her anxiety build false aggression in her tone. She’s been better about that, lately -- not getting defensive when there’s nothing to be fighting against. Her dad would say it’s the exercise, the fact that she’s been eating and sleeping on a schedule. But she thinks it might be JJ, and their friends, reminding her every day what laughter feels like, what it is to let a smile hit the very center of your chest. 

“Nothing,” he says, his grin wide and easy, blue eyes sparkling, just enjoying the morning by her side. 

She finishes the pancakes and makes another omelet for herself, makes JJ wait to eat more until she’s got her plate built and she knows that there will be food  _ left _ for her. He ribs her gently as they eat about the music, knowing that she’s usually so careful with her playlists. She admits that she likes a good mindless escape every now and then, points out that this music is popular for a reason. He helps her clear up, washing while she dries, and soon, his hips start to move, and he’s crooning into the plastic spatula like it’s a microphone, making her laugh. The playlist has looped back around to the same song she was listening to when he surprised her, and, shockingly, he knows all the words. 

“When you’re with me, no judgement!” he sings, and then holds the spatula out for her to sing the next line. She hesitates, half a second, but the open encouragement in his eyes, the lack of anything but careless fun, makes the choice for her. 

“You can get that from anyone else,” she sings, and his grin puts something warm and heavy and secure around her shoulders, her feet gliding across the hardwood floors like she knows they will always be there to hold her up. 

He puts the spatula back up to his own mouth. “You don’t have to prove nothin’,” he croons, and then opens his eyes, looking directly into hers, and the goofiness is there, but something bigger, too, a genuine sincerity that he channels into the next line. “You can just be yourself.”

Kiara dives into the next chorus. “When you’re with me, no judgement!” and then, he’s singing with her. 

_ “ _ We can get that from everyone else -- When you’re with me, no judgement.”

He serenades her with the bridge and she lifts on her toes, hips twisting as her hands twirl in the air. Then, as the chorus comes around again, he leans his face forward towards her chest, and she humors him for just a moment, shimmying as he shakes his head back and forth before playfully shoving him away. Expecting one or both of them to feel weird about it, she catches his eye, but he’s grooving now, knees bent, dipping his head as he slides his shoulders back and forth. His expression is ridiculous. She laughs, and he does too, and the song rings in the golden kitchen, in the mid-morning hour, and that word, inescapable, now, settles under her skin. 

_ Home. _

When they finish the dishes, he goes to head for the shower and she reaches for his elbow. He stops at the barest touch, his eyes landing on her hand before flicking back up to meet hers. “You’re not gonna --” she bites her lip, doesn’t notice how his eyes drop, rocking on her heels. “You’re not gonna tell anyone about that, are you?” 

A wrinkle forms between his eyebrows, his head tilting just slightly. JJ reminds her of a golden retriever sometimes, all loping energy and goofy grins. “About what?” he asks, and she notices the way his tongue flicks out to wet his lips, blames her sudden breathlessness on all the dancing. She nods to the speaker, and relief irons out his features. “The music?” 

Kie nods, and when her hand falls from his arm, the golden glow of the kitchen seems to dim a few notches. “It’s just, y’know,” she tucks her hands in the back pockets of her shorts, looking anywhere but his stupidly blue eyes, open and clear and trained on her. “I’ve got a reputation to protect.” The joke feels lame as it falls out of her mouth, but JJ’s smile ticks upward all the same, always at the ready. 

He takes half a step out of her space, and breath rushes out of her lungs, surprising them both. He recovers quickly, backing out of the kitchen to go shower. “Our little secret,” he says, and then drops a wink before turning away. 

It takes her a second to remember how to breathe. 

JJ takes forever in the shower (which she doesn’t understand -- it’s not like he has any fucking hair to wash) and in the meantime, she goes into her room and pulls her ukulele from its case, considering. It’s a beautiful day, early summer, before it gets horrifically sticky and overall much too hot, and she has missed sitting on the porch writing songs, which she always used to do at her parent’s house. She drifts over to the trunk at the end of her bed, flipping it open and running her hands over the contents. They’re journals, years of them, leather-bound and spiral school notebooks, tattered pages and covered with stickers, songs and poetry and the thoughts of an island-bound girl with no friends and no hope for any. Her past seems to shimmer up from the paper, like heat from asphalt, and she crosses her arms on the edge, propping her chin on her wrists. 

What would she tell her old self, if she could talk to her? What would fifteen-year-old Kiara need, to get through two years of high school and two more after that, to feel like enough? She reaches out and picks up a white notebook covered in stickers that she used her senior year of high school. She wants to open it, even though she knows what’s inside will only make her sad. Taking the notebook out of the chest, she smooths her hand across the cover, catching on all the stickers plastered over it. There’s a song somewhere in it’s pages, something about falling in love with sunshine, about feeling like it’s the only warmth she’ll ever be able to trust. Sad, angsty, seventeen-year-old crap. She puts the notebook back in the trunk. 

Grabbing her ukulele, she picks up her journal and a pen from her nightstand, and ventures out onto the porch. 

She’s halfway through the first verse when JJ comes out of the house, wearing his usual uniform of a cutoff and cargo shorts. He’s got a raggedy old white towel in his hands, scrubbing at his half-dry hair. Surprise dawns on his face, but he’s quiet, watching her finger pick and run out of words halfway through a phrase, singing quietly around the pencil in her mouth. He leans against the threshold, ankles crossed, damp towel hanging from his hand, just watching. Kie thinks for a second, and plays it through again, this time seeming to complete the thought before scribbling it down. 

“Hey,” he says, once she’s finished writing it down. 

“Hey,” she says, barely glancing over her shoulder before returning to her project. He smiles, half-made and for no one but himself, soft and real and reaching up through his eyes with a sincerity she doesn’t see. 

“I’m going down to the dock,” he says, waiting for a response he knows he isn’t going to get, head tilted as he enjoys seeing her completely wrapped up in her music. He had an idea she wrote her own songs -- he’d seen the journal, the ukulele case, noticed the way she’d close her eyes and listen to the same song over and over again. He’s seen her dance before, twirling about the kitchen when she thinks he can’t see. “Gonna work on the Pogue for a while.” 

“Yeah, okay,” she says, without looking up. All of their shoes are in a pile by the door, and he picks up his boots and shoves them on, picking up his bag of tools from its spot by the railing. He plods across the porch, and, when he’s halfway out the screen door, she turns around, bracing one hand on the back of her chair to look at him. “Hey --” she says, and he stops, raising his eyebrows. “Cubanos for lunch?” 

JJ’s eyes roll back in his head. “ _ Fuck _ yes,” he sighs, and she laughs, even as something deep in her belly lights at the sound and the sight of him. Yes, her roommate is hot. She’s learned to live with it. 

Kiara taught him to make the grilled sandwiches a few weeks ago, and it’s his favorite lunch to take to the garage. She even got him an insulated lunch box, so they stay warm through the morning. He said the other guys made fun of him for a while, but then she helped him make six one morning, to share, and now they’re always begging for them. He always complains that his don’t taste the same, though, and, when she’s feeling charitable, she’ll make them for him. It’s usually on their days off, or the weekends, when she works the closing shift and won’t be home for dinner. 

Squinting into the sun, JJ’s steps are heavy on the boat dock, his messy blond hair shifting in the slight breeze. He shines, golden hair, golden skin, golden boy, so bright he might be glowing himself, rather than just sparkling in the light. She looks down at her lyrics, metaphors about the ocean and the moon, and she leans down, erasing and rewriting a few things before sitting back, satisfied. Pulling her knee up on her chair, she rests her elbow on it, and then her chin in her hand. JJ turns and waves when he reaches the small motorboat, squinting against the glare, and she smiles and waves back. 

He drops his tool bag on the deck and dips to one knee, rifling through it and pulling out necessary tools in fluid, practiced motions, barely looking at them, knowing them by the shape and weight of them in his hand. It’s like watching an author write, or an artist paint or sculpt or draw. Engines -- this is JJ’s art, his expertise, the thing he knows better than anything, different details but the same basic concepts, fuel, filter, alternator, spark plugs, pistons -- different shapes, different functions, different quirks and fallbacks and letdowns, but he can look inside them and see the main way through, find the problem, and fix it. 

There’s an inherent trust, a domesticity somewhere in this moment that Kiara feels but cannot properly describe. She works on her art, he on his, same afternoon, same space, sharing time and company and knowing the other will be there, in the evening, when they’ve pulled themselves from their focus and gone looking for companionship once more. He’s become a constant, somehow, without her noticing, a facet of her life that she considers in her plans, the way she acts and feels and moves. A permanent fixture that, somehow, she knows will stay. 

The idea makes her smile without knowing it, calm and unconscious in the balmy morning, tucking her lip under her teeth, dropping her arm and resting her temple on her knee. She feels, for once, at rest, the furious racetrack of anxiety that loops around her thoughts finally quiet and still. There is nothing more that she has to be in this moment, nothing else she should be doing, no plans or lack thereof to stress over. It’s just her, and him. Day off, sunshine, hobbies, good food made together. For the second time that morning, the word echoes through her chest. 

_ Home _ . 

Later, she calls him up from the dock, makes him wash his hands in the mudroom so he doesn’t stick up the kitchen drain with engine grease. JJ cuts and butters the bread, assembling the sandwiches for her to press into the skillet, holding down the flat metal spatula over the top. She’d heated it over the stove before using it, imitating a sandwich press in the absence of one. When the food is done, he surprises her by snagging two longneck beers from the fridge and heading for the door. 

“Wanna eat outside?” he asks. It’s the first words they’ve said in the while, relying on their delightfully odd, wordless communication to move their bodies past each other in the kitchen. The tranquility of the afternoon has settled their voices as well as their minds, made silence welcoming and kind rather than stilted and awkward. They didn’t talk about anything because there was nothing to talk about, just the peace that came from busy minds finally at rest. 

She pauses for just a moment, taking in the way he’s silhouetted by the golden light, glowing through his hair, now sticky and messy with sweat. The sunlight glints off the rings on the hand holding the drinks, highlights the shadow of sculpted muscle, and her eyes catch on the way his fingers curl around the necks of the bottles before she looks up at him, and nods. 

“How’s the Pogue?” she asks as they walk across the grass toward the deck, swapping his plate for her beer. 

JJ’s nose scrunches with apparent frustration. “Old,” he jokes. “It  _ was _ the filter, but I just replaced it earlier,” he adds, sounding annoyed. “But now it’s something else. John B wants to take her out when he gets off work, so that might not happen.” He stops at the end of the dock, sitting on the edge and dangling his legs off the edge. He takes her food from her and sets it down so she can sit, offering a hand to stabilize her as she puts one foot carefully over the edge of the dock. Taking it is second nature, neither of them questioning the casual touch. She pulls her plate into her lap, and he holds out his hand for her beer. She hands it over, wondering if he’ll pull a bottle opener from his pocket, but he just cups his palm over the top and uses the edge of one of his rings to pop off the lid. 

“Nice trick,” she comments, a beat too late. 

He grins at her. “Comes in handy.” 

They eat slowly, savoring the good food and the sunlight, gazing out over the marsh. Water birds coast low over the tall grass, calling out to each other, and a Heron flaps its enormous wings as it takes off, chased away by a pack of smaller, fiercer birds. It looks unbothered, even as the smaller birds call and screech angrily. 

She takes a sip, measuring her next words carefully. “I could take a look at it,” she says, doesn’t turn her head when she feels his eyes land on her in surprise. “If you want me to.” 

“Didn’t know you were a mechanic,” he says, and there’s genuine surprise behind the teasing. 

“Not really,” she admits, “But my dad used to have me help him fix our boat, before they --”  _ bought a new one,  _ is what she was going to say, but she doesn’t want him to call her a kook again. He’s been better about it, the way he talks about her family and their money, but she knows it still chafes, sometimes. “Um, when I was a kid,” she self-edits. 

He ducks his head, almost imperceptibly, for just a moment, and she knows he heard what she didn’t say. “I learned from my dad, too,” he says, and she turns to look at him, utterly shocked. He’s never volunteered information about his family before, not once. He’s squinting across the marsh, the afternoon sun dipping closer to the mainland, far away and out of sight. She waits for him to say more, but he doesn’t. She wants to reach out, put her hand on his knee or his shoulder, ground him, pull him from the thoughts she knows are storming in his mind. 

Unconsciously, she reaches out, and, when he looks at her, her hand is hovering in the air between them. He looks at it, and she does too, and then she slowly lowers it, landing on her beer bottle, and taking another sip. She looks away from him, then, over the water, and she can feel his eyes linger on her for just a moment more before he speaks again, and then tension is broken. 

“You could take a look if you want,” he says, “always appreciate another set of eyes on the problem.” They finish eating quickly, the silence stilted this time, tainted by the mention of his father, even when she knows nothing about him. It’s JJ who seems uneasy, really, his blue eyes, normally clear and laughing, hazy, like he’s closed the blinds and leaned away from himself, caught in memories that don’t match the golden afternoon. Taking a deep breath, Kiara sets her plate behind her, leaning back on her hands, closing her eyes and soaking in the sunlight. She keeps her breath even, reminding herself that his sudden silence isn’t her fault, that she didn’t say anything wrong. JJ is cagey about his family at the best of times. He doesn’t need her distress adding to the reason he won’t talk about them. 

Finally, he drains his drink and clambers to his feet, offering a hand up. “Ready?” he asks, and when she looks up, his usual smile is back in place, even if it has dimmed a few notches. She nods, and takes his hand. They cross the dock and he helps her down into the boat, one hand landing on her waist when she stumbles at the roll of the channel. “Careful,” he says, as her hands land on his shoulders, and when she looks up, he’s too close, his trickster’s grin tugging at the edges of his mouth. She swats at his chest. 

“Hands off,” she says, teasing. He does, holding them out in mock surrender, and she flicks her hair over her shoulder and clambers to the stern to look at the engine. 

What follows is at least an hour of her trying various things with little success, JJ alternating between leaning over her shoulder and attempting to turn the engine from the controls. At some point, he dashes his hand over his array of tools in frustration, landing on the deck with his head in his hands, and something goes skittering across her feet. On closer inspection, it’s a new spark plug. 

“Hey dumbass,” she says, holding it up. “You forget about this?” He picks his head up to glare at her, realization rolling across his features when he realizes what she’s holding. 

“Fuck,” he sighs, and she laughs. 

“Yeah,” she agrees, tossing it to him, propping one hand on her hip as she catches it. “Mildly important.” 

“I knew there was something else I bought,” he says, standing and sighing, frustration and regret clear on his features. 

“So you bought a new one,” she says, sardonic, “and then forgot you needed to replace it.” 

“Not my fault I’m stupid,” he says, making a face as he slides past her. She laughs, not seeing his answering smile as he leans over the engine. She leans on the steering wheel, watching his strong shoulders, his fingers are agile as they twist out the old one. 

The thing is, JJ  _ isn’t _ stupid. He’s forgetful and messy and scatter-brained, sure, but he’s not  _ dumb _ . She’s heard him talk about this old boat, listened to the way he’s described all the repairs he’s done through the years. He remembers each one, how long ago he did them, what circumstance prompted the need. He names every boat they putter past in the marina, listing their stats and pros and cons as John B stands at the wheel and Pope rolls his eyes. They’ve clearly listened to it for years, used to it, tuning him out. But she watches the way he seems to click in, his stupid blue eyes lighting up, that easy, absent smile hanging from his lips like he doesn’t even know it’s there. He’s even picking up cooking wicked fast, even though she has to keep slapping his hands away from hot pot handles and remind him to use potholders when he takes something out of the oven. 

“You’re not stupid,” she says, and his back goes rigid at the sincerity in her tone. 

“Try it now,” he says, standing and slapping his hands together, like that’ll do anything to wipe off the grease. She bites the inside of her lip, waiting half a beat before she spins and turns the key in the ignition. 

The rattling old engine roars to life, and JJ shoves his hands in the air. “Fuck yeah!” he crows, and then looks at her, and he’s beaming now, this small victory wiping all earlier awkwardness from his smile. “Nice job.” Her stomach flips over, and she tells herself it’s because she’s bad at taking compliments, and not the way his eyes are sparkling at her. 

Shrugging, she puts her hands behind her, leaning on the wheel again. “Thank you,” she says, avoiding accepting the compliment sincerely with heavy sarcasm. “I worked very hard.” He rolls his eyes and skirts around the center controls to reorganize and put away his tools. She turns to watch him, leaning her elbows on the back of the captain’s chair. “You don’t talk about your family much,” she says, offhand. She’s not exactly known for her tact, usually, but she’s lived at the Chateau for four months, and the only time he’s ever talked about his family was that weekend in April, the drive to the farmer’s market when she forced the subject. This has to be dangerous territory. 

He pauses, half a second, barely a stutter in the smooth, familiar movements of cleaning his tools and repacking them. “Not much to say,” he says, the casual tone of his voice more than a little forced. “Mom left, Dad’s a piece of shit, and they only had one kid, so no one else to disappoint.” A hollow opens in Kiara’s chest in answer to the emptiness in the way he speaks, so devoid of love or even the hope for it. “I’ve got some cousins on the island but they --” he stops, his hand flexing around a wrench, his grip going white-knuckled before relaxing. “Well. They deal, so. I don’t hang out with them a lot.” 

For a moment, Kiara wants to ask ‘deal what,’ and then remembers how JJ never seems to run out of weed, and figures his cousin is probably running things a lot harder than that. She doesn’t know what to say next, just bites her lip as he puts the last of his tools in his case and then zips it closed. He stands, and then pauses for just a moment, his eyes on his feet, shoulders slumped and defeated. She kicks herself, wondering why she had to go and ruin this quiet, perfect day. 

“Listen --” they say at the same time, JJ half-turned, speaking over his shoulder. As their voices collide in the air, his eyes flicker up to hers, surprise and vulnerability flickering there, new and open and raw, a piece of him she’s never seen. 

“I’m sorry,” Kie says, quickly, before he can say anything else, needing him to know this, to know that hurting him is the last thing she wants to do. “I didn’t mean to --” she starts, and he turns fully toward her, holding up one hand. 

“You didn’t”, he says, but he’s not looking at her, his shaggy hair in his eyes, gaze flitting between the deck and the horizon. JJ blows out a harsh breath and looks up, knitting his hands together behind his head and dropping them again, knocking his fist into his palm, rocking on his heels. The movement is nervous, reluctant, and strange. He doesn’t want to be talking about this, and guilt stirs and surges in her chest that she’s the cause. 

“It’s just --” he starts, and then the words seem to get stuck in his throat, and he clears it before looking up at her. The sun shines brilliantly, his clear blue eyes vibrant and flashing. It’s just for a moment, but Kiara sees the grief there, the panic as he searches through his head, holding a shattered childhood in his hands and trying to explain it to her. Once again, she wants to touch him. 

“You remember how that guy at the farmer’s market knew my name?” he asks, and she nods, slowly. “My dad, he --” he chokes, swallows, licks his lips, his hand shaking back and forth at his side, a release of excess anxious energy. “He’s not a good man, Kie. And a lot of people know who he is, because of it.” The vulnerability in his eyes almost hurts. “I don’t talk about him because --” his voice breaks, and her heart with it. She wants nothing more than to cross the small deck and wrap her arms around him, but she doesn’t dare move, doesn’t want to break his trust in any way, doesn’t want to do anything he doesn’t expect. “Because most people already know, around here.” He licks his lips, shifts his weight, looks up at her and then back down again. “I just -- I didn’t want to talk about it, and I --” He tugs on his bangs. “I don’t know.” She waits, because he does know. He just doesn’t want to say it out loud. “I didn’t --” he tries, and then lets out a small huff, like he hates the words for getting stuck in his throat. “I didn’t want you to know, I guess.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, mumbles the next words, like he’s not sure he actually wants to say them. “I didn’t want you to look at me any different.” 

She does move then, crossing the small distance and throwing her arms around him, feeling him stagger in surprise before his arms come up around her waist and he tucks his face against her shoulder. His grip is tight and sure around her, and somehow, she knows that he is grateful for this, even though he never would have initiated it, himself. He’s different, with her, than the boys. There’s a refreshing lack of toxic masculinity between JJ and his friends. They’re always climbing all over each other, arms slung around necks, bodies hoisted onto backs, heads rested on shoulders. It’s a comfortable intimacy, born from years of small spaces and growing boys, the lack of boundaries that comes from childhood growing seamlessly into the way they touch without thinking.

JJ doesn’t have that same ease with her, of course. Kiara knows that she’s still the new kid, doesn’t expect them to grow accustomed to her presence in such a short time. But the way he hugs her, the way he holds on, hints that maybe it’s not for a lack of wanting to. Maybe they’ve been circling each other, held back by societal rules and expectations that neither of them have ever had much inclination to follow, when they should have been letting themselves crash into each other, instead. 

“I wouldn’t look at you any different,” she says, the words falling out of her mouth as they occur, feeling too much like a secret. He doesn’t say anything in response, just presses his forehead to her shoulder, squeezes his arms around her waist. Neither of them know it, not really, not in a way they can explain, but there is an allowance, here, for JJ to be himself, for him to step off the precipice he’s been teetering on, for him to fall, and for Kiara to catch him. Slowly, she lowers back down on her heels, having stood on tiptoe to reach him, and they come apart, almost reluctant in the way their bodies separate in the humid afternoon. 

There’s a moment, when his hands are on her waist and hers are on his shoulders, and his golden hair is gleaming in the sun, and he’s so close and warm and kind, this boy, beaten and rusted and still running, from what, she doesn’t think she’ll ever know, where she wonders what this pull between them might have been, had they met on a different day, as different people leading different lives. If JJ wasn’t her roommate -- what then? Would she give into this pull, this magnetic force that draws her closer, even as she stands in his arms? Would he kiss her, the way he looks like he wants to, as his eyes drop to her mouth, as his breath catches when she bites her lip? The silence is heavy and terrifying and mercifully broken when Kie’s phone rings in her back pocket. 

He lets go of her first, and she steps out of his grasp to answer the call, fighting the heat rising in her face as he turns away and grabs the keys out of the ignition. He’s deliberately not looking at her, but she doesn’t notice -- she’s deliberately not looking at him. 

“Hello?” she says, realizing that she didn’t even check the caller ID, is a little shocked when it’s Sarah’s voice that comes down the line. 

“ _ Hey!”  _ Sarah’s voice sounds forcefully cheerful, but that doesn’t really mean much, considering that’s the tone of voice Kiara is most used to hearing from her. “ _ Are you busy?” _

“Um,” Kiara says, looking over her shoulder at JJ, who’s finished packing up his tools and is now cleaning up the detritus of packaging and grease from the installation of the new parts. “Not really, why?” 

Sarah sighs, and then asks, like she’s been gearing herself up for it; “ _ Do you wanna come over?”  _

The question takes Kiara back immediately. She hasn’t heard from Sarah since the welcome party months ago, not one-on-one at least. She’s been on the HMS Pogue with them a few times, come to the beach and read while they surfed, even spent a few nights smoking on the porch. They’re a little closer than they were before, but not much, and they don’t have an individual relationship, still. Kiara wonders if she wants one, now that the opportunity is here, in front of her. She could have Sarah as a friend, as  _ her _ friend, outside of JJ and his boys. She remembers, in an instant, all of the time they spent together their first two years of high school, before Sarah started dating Topper and the girl she knew faded into the image that everyone expected her to be. But Sarah seems different now, like she’s rediscovered herself now that she’s moved away from Figure Eight and it’s yawning social chasm that swallows whole any attempt at individualism. She seems like she might be the kind of person that Kiara could be friends with. 

“Yeah,” she finds herself saying. “Sure, what time?” 

Sarah sounds upset, is wildly unsuccessful at trying to hide it. “ _ Is, like, now okay?” _ It strikes Kiara that Sarah needs someone. Something has gone wrong, and somehow, Kiara has become the person that she calls. It must be something with John B, otherwise she’d go to him.

In an instant, Kiara understands. Sarah doesn’t  _ have _ anyone else to call. She’d left them all behind when she moved in with a surfer with no career, no wealth, and no plan for either. Essentially, she’s exactly where Kiara is, right now, and they’re the closest the other is going to get to someone who genuinely understands. Kiara takes one last look at JJ, who’s standing near the edge of the boat, attempting to look busy but really just listening, his tool bag packed and the mess cleaned up. She thinks about the way he’d held her, the instant that hung between them before Sarah’s call, and her mind takes an immediate left-turn, an aversion to analyzing the circumstance any further that’s so strong it constricts in her chest. 

“Yeah,” Kiara says, looks away right before JJ’s shoulders tense. “Yeah, I’ll be right over.” 

“ _ Thanks, babe, _ ” Sarah says, and there’s an uncomfortable amount of relief, there, a betrayal of her desperation, but there’s understanding, too. Both of them, somehow, came to the same conclusion. They have to be there for each other, because no one else will. 

Kie comes up beside JJ and puts her hand on his shoulder to get his attention, like she doesn’t already know she has it, and he jumps a little at the contact. He doesn’t know if she notices the way his muscles twitch under her hand or if she just pretends not to. 

“That was Sarah,” she says, and he’s hyper-aware of the way her hand slides down his shoulder blade and off his back. He steps off the boat and on to the dock, and then offers his hand for her to do so as well. She takes it, half-paying attention even as he doesn’t take his eyes off of her. “She asked me to come over,” Kiara says, and she can’t hide the confusion in her voice. 

She looks up at him, then, and JJ’s eyebrows are drawn together. “I didn’t know you guys were -- like that.” 

Kie taps her phone against her lips. “We really aren’t,” she says, and he tilts his head like a baffled golden retriever. Her eyes snap up to his and he looks mildly surprised at the intensity of her gaze. “Did you hear from John B?” she asks, and it occurs to him that whatever spell had been cast, over lunch and the sun sparkling across the marsh, has been broken. Kiara is somewhere else now, and it’s on him to catch up. “Did they get into a fight or something?” 

JJ shrugs because this is  _ way _ out of his territory. “I don’t know,” he admits. “He didn’t say anything. Just that he was coming over after work to fish.” 

“Well maybe that’s what the fight’s about,” Kie says, like it’s obvious, and JJ looks mildly dumbfounded, not understanding how she’s made that jump at all. She slips her phone into her back pocket and stares at him, waiting for him to grasp something his mind refuses to wrap itself around. He remembers what she told him about not being stupid and, in this moment, doubts it, severely. 

Finally, he says; “How the fuck could they have a fight about that.” 

She rolls her eyes and scoffs something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like “fucking  _ men, _ ” and then asks; “Are you gonna be okay for dinner?” He doesn’t have to ask what she means. 

“There’s leftovers, I think,” he says, shrugging. He’s off, and she knows it, knows it probably has something to do with his dad and the weird, heavy moment after she hugged him, but now there’s Sarah in her head, too, demanding a piece of the emotional energy that’s stunted and half-grown, anyway. If she was someone else, she’d put a hand under his chin, lift his gaze to meet hers, demand to know the cause of the storm brewing behind those bottomless blue eyes. But she doesn’t have a right to his heart like that, has to step back and respect the wall he’s put between them, no matter how false and half-constructed it feels. 

So all she says is “you sure?” and has to believe him when he nods. She collects their plates and bottles from the end of the dock, and he heads up to the house without her. Somehow, it feels wrong. 

He’s showering by the time she makes it up to the house, and she puts away the clean dishes and washes the ones in the sink by herself. Usually, they would do them together, laughing and flicking soap at each other, but he crosses the hallway into his room after he showers, and doesn’t come back out, so she just does them on her own. 

“I’ll be back later!” she calls, halfway out the door. She’s only ever lived with family, so yelling hello and goodbye, telling the other people in the house where you’re going, it feels like second nature to her, and she thinks it alarmed JJ when she started doing it at the Chateau, too. But, like almost everything, it’s become a habit, a quiet reminder that she belongs here, that he cares about her, wants to know where she is and when she’s coming home, if only for peace of mind. But there’s no affirmative yelled back across the small house, no shaggy blonde head poked into the hallway to say goodbye. She pretends not to care, but somewhere, it stings. 

The drive to Sarah’s is short, and she spends all of it with her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, scraping it raw in a way she knows she’ll regret later. Her mind storms with scenarios and possibilities on the drive, but it's background noise, a buzzing chatter she’s been getting better at ignoring. To her surprise, it’s JJ at the forefront of her mind, the strange energy she left behind nagging at her consciousness. It frustrates her -- she didn’t do anything  _ wrong _ , and neither did he. It’s this kind of social ineptitude that damned her to life as a loner in high school. She could never follow all the stupid silent rules and wavering morays that governed the halls of Kildare Country Day. People never meant what they said or said what they meant and it was all too exhausting to keep track of. 

There’s frustration, beneath the confusion, a little bit of anger at JJ, disappointment, maybe, because she thought he might be different. She thought that they would be able to get past all of the bullshit that normally separates her from other people. She thought they already had. She knows he has secrets. All people do, and his, at least, she can see the shape of, when there’s a sudden noise or the boys roughhouse a little too hard. He never talks about his father, and she’s been half-sure for a long time as to the reason why.

The conclusion rolls over her as she pulls up to Sarah and John B’s condo. She got close.  _ Too  _ close, apparently. She almost laughs at the irony of it. He got weird because she’d figured him out, reached inside of him and told him she didn’t mind the mess. The funny part is that she would have done the same. It would scare her, if she thought about it too long, how close she and JJ have become in such a short time. He clicks, settles into her mind and at her side like no one has before, and she hates how tied she is to him already, hates how the thought of him being upset is bugging her so much. But her phone lights up again before she can think about it too much, and it’s Sarah, and she remembers the reason that she’s here and gets out of the car. 

Sarah tries to be cheerful when she opens the door, but her hair is a mess and her face is puffy. She’s always been a bad liar. The condo isn’t a mess, not like the Chateau gets when Kie hasn’t been after JJ about his beer bottles and they’ve been too busy for dishes, but it’s not catalogue-clean the way it was when they were here for the housewarming party. There’s clutter on the coffee table and a surfboard in the hall. Sarah trips over the ankle leash and curses up a storm, and then stops and stares at the board, looking rather like she wants to punch it. 

“Hey,” Kiara says, surprising herself, honestly. “Is everything okay?” 

Sarah looks up at her, and Kiara watches her school the frustration off her face, smoothing it over into a half-woven picture of calm and composure. But the kook training has worn off, during Sarah’s time in the Cut, and the frazzled girl still remains, now just poorly covered. Kie’s a little frustrated, patience already short after all of the nonsense and overthinking with JJ. This, she realizes, is part of the reason she and Sarah fell out, eventually. Sarah’s shit at communicating how she’s actually feeling, usually prioritizing ‘the peace’ over herself, and, as such, her energy would change without Kie knowing why, and then left her unable to find out. Why else would Sarah call her? She must need something. Kie just wants to know what it is. 

“Everything --” Sarah covers her face with her hands for a second, and then, like she’s wiping it clean, comes up with a half-hearted smile. Her gaze is soft as she looks at Kiara, and Kie is rankled by it, the way she looks like she still knows her, even after all these years. Kiara has her walls up, is discomfited by the idea that Sarah can still see past them.

“I mean, no,” Sarah laughs, watery and empty of any humor. “Which I know you can tell.” Kiara’s face wrinkles and Sarah smiles. “Some things never change, Kie,” she says, and Kiara doesn’t know if she uses the nickname as a callback to the years they spent as friends or if she’s picked it up from JJ. 

“Sarah…” Kie starts, watches her face fall as the word falls out of her mouth. “Why did you call me?” Tears well up in Sarah’s eyes, then, and guilt prickles in Kiara’s throat, but to swallow it would also be to shove down her pride, which she doesn’t know if she can do. 

“I didn’t --” Sarah chokes, and that guilt gains horns and hooves and Kiara fights it, as much as she can. “I didn’t have -- I didn’t know who else to call.” And Kiara thought that, but hearing it out loud is different. Somehow, worse. 

And it’s this that forces Kiara forward, wrapping her arms around Sarah, letting her fall, falling with her. The two girls crash into each other, after years apart, and they were right, at first, but too young to see it. Twin flames, just lit at the wrong time. Kie had burned, long and slow, waiting for Sarah to find her spark. Maybe John B was what they were both waiting for. Because now, Kiara has these friends, this  _ family _ , in a way she never did. 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says, and it’s not a sob, not really, but close to it. “I’m sorry for all of it.” 

“It’s fine,” Kiara says, mostly because she doesn’t want Sarah to  _ actually _ start crying, and partially because she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. 

Sarah pulls away, swiping at old mascara that’s already half-cried off, speaking so quickly Kie is only catching every other word. “You were  _ suffocating _ ,” Sarah says, and it hits Kiara, a stone dropped down her throat and landing noisily beneath her ribs. High school. Their falling out that wasn’t really a falling out -- a gradual growing away when Kiara became frustrated with Sarah’s dedication to fitting in. “and I refused to see it, I told myself --” Her hands flutter beside her face and hold themselves out to the sides, and Kie is just watching now, listening to Sarah come to the same conclusions she’s been circling around for years. “I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. But I didn’t have your back, when it counted, and  _ God _ , Kie. I’m  _ so _ fucking sorry.” 

Kiara doesn’t know how to react to that, doesn’t know how she’s supposed to. There’s no protocol for this, no previous experience that she can draw on. She feels ambushed, and a little upset, like now it’s her  _ job _ to forgive Sarah, like she’s going to look like a bad person if she doesn’t. But then, Sarah looks at her, messy, half-made, brown eyes beseeching and exhausted, and Kie thinks she can give Sarah this. The wound, scarred and picked at and sometimes still bleeding, has finally begun to heal. 

“Is this what you called me about?” Kiara asks, and Sarah looks taken a back for half a moment ,before recognition slides into place, instead. 

“No,” she says, looking down at her feet. And then; “not really. Kind of, I guess. John B and I got in a fight.” 

“About what?” Kie asks, and there’s hope sparkling in Sarah's brown eyes, now, an understanding of the forgiveness she’s been granted. She knows it’s minute, knows that Kiara is too proud to say it, but she’s relieved all the same. Kie has always been bad at apologizing, maybe even worse at accepting them. She’s asked about the fight, stayed when she could leave. This, Sarah decides, is enough. 

“I told him I thought he was spending too much time with his friends,” Sarah says, finally leading them out of the hall and into the living room. “And he wasn’t even mad,” she says on a sigh, collapsing into the couch. Kiara lowers herself carefully, keeping her eyes on Sarah, still wary, careful not to completely relax. Sarah leans sideways into the couch, resting her elbow on the top and settling her head against her hand. Kie tucks one leg under her and fiddles with the hem of her joggers. They’re one of her favorite pairs -- olive green with big pockets and cinched ankles, and she rubs the smooth drawstring between her thumb and fingers, twisting it around them as Sarah talks. 

“And I don’t know, it's just like -- I got pissed that he wasn’t mad,” Sarah admits, looking at some point over Kiara’s head, tired and baffled with the situation and herself, exhausted with the world. “How crazy is that?” She looks at Kie, now, and Kie is used to this -- feels some amount of pleasant nostalgia creeping in. She missed this, gossiping with a girlfriend, bemoaning men and the world and just settling in, being on someone’s side. She likes listening to her friends, being there for them, even when she doesn’t really know what to say. JJ talks plenty, but never about what bothers him, and there’s something cathartic about listening to someone vent. 

“It’s a little crazy,” Kiara agrees, and Sarah laughs, sarcastic still, but the smile is genuine. 

“Thanks,” she says, and rolls her eyes, and Kiara shrugs, biting down on a smile of her own. “And then he said that I should try and spend time with my  _ own _ friends,” Sarah continues, “and like, he was just being reasonable, you know? Like, we love each other, but we have to have lives outside of our relationship --” Kiara just nods, because the closest thing she’s come to relationships is summer flings with Tourons she always keeps at arms length and Roger Avery freshman year of high school, who she liked until he slobbered all over her behind the gym and then called himself her boyfriend for two weeks before she told him not-so-politely to fuck off. 

“And that’s when I realized… I don’t --” Sarah heaves a sigh. “I don’t really have any friends.” Hearing her say it hits her a little differently, and Kie sucks in a deep breath without thinking, hopes it’s quiet enough that Sarah doesn’t notice it. “And I just got so mad --” she shakes her head, massages her forehead before covering her eyes with her hand. “I just shut down. And he tried to make it better --” she scoffs out a half-laugh, and Kie thinks of kind, loving John B, always certain that he can do something to help, understands how Sarah might end up frustrated with his eternally calm demeanor. 

“And I just told him to go have fun,” Sarah continues, finishing her story, chuckling at her own expense when Kiara leans back, eyebrows raised. That phrase, coupled with the tone she knows Sarah adopts when she’s upset, is a boyfriend kiss of death. “Yeah,” she laughs. “Clearly, I have  _ excellent _ communication skills.” 

The silence is only awkward because Kiara has no idea what to say, and Sarah pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping one arm around them and fiddling with a loose thread on the couch cushion with the other. This is the part where the best friend says something -- Kie’s seen the movies, watched the TV shows -- she knows this. But she never knew what to say, even when she and Sarah  _ were _ close, and she doesn’t know how much of the fifteen year old girl she knew remains in the young woman in front of her. 

“What happened then?” Kiara asks, because somehow, Sarah decided to call her, between the fight and now, and she’s still not sure she completely understands that decision. 

Sarah sighs again, dropping her knees until she’s sitting cross legged, picking at her nails while she speaks. “I had a whole crisis,” she says, and Kie can’t help it -- she snorts. Sarah’s eyes flick up, taken aback and a little hurt, and Kiara scrambles to recover. 

“Very on brand,” she jokes, and Sarah’s smile is annoyed and self-aware. 

“Yeah, whatever,” she says, but without any time of bitterness. The way she takes the joke relieves some of the tension in Kiara’s shoulders. Maybe she still does know Sarah Cameron, even after all these years. “But I thought about Scarlet and Jenna and all those other bitches we --” and, at Kiara’s raised eyebrows, Sarah corrects herself “--  _ I _ hung out with in high school, and I realized that as soon as I started dating John B and moved away, they just… stopped talking to me. And it’s not like I can hang out with anyone from work.” 

Sarah’s been working as a real estate agent for Ward. Kiara thinks Sarah’s dad is a slimeball -- always has -- but he remains the wealthiest developer and real-estate mogul on the island, and he’s been grooming Sarah to take over since they were teenagers. The life is hers for the taking -- big house or three, yachts and jet skis and expensive clothes. But Sarah looks more at home in her oversize crewneck and athletic shorts than anything that her step-mother might own, the only jewelry a delicate gold necklace around her neck. Kie has seen her on the deck of the HMS Pogue, laughing as JJ attempts his flying beer trick for the thousandth time, watched her drag her feet through the shallows and wave from under her ridiculous sunhat, seen how she fits into the landscape of the ratty yard at the Chateau, golden hair ablaze in the setting sun.

Sarah belongs to the earth, sunbeams in her skin and soil in her eyes, rich and nurturing. Kiara can’t imagine her in some big house, bare feet on cold marble when they smooth so kindly over old, sun-warmed boards. Ward and Rose Cameron float above the earth in a glass castle made of wealth, and Sarah has been searching for a way to shatter the floor since she was a child. Kiara can’t ever see her climbing back up, no matter how wide and easy the path. 

“So you called me,” Kiara says, the realizations she’s been having the entire afternoon finally settling in, like they’d been storming around inside of her and have finally found their places, quiet and content and curling up to the rest. 

Sarah shrugs, attempting nonchalance even as her eyes flicker from the thread she’s winding around her finger to Kiara’s face. “I figured --” her head falls to the side, and Kiara watches her hands, thinks about reaching out for one of them, wonders how long it’s been since Sarah was touched like that -- with genuine friendship. She has John B, of course, and her family, but comfort from a friend is a different kind, very rarely genuine, and immeasurable when it is. “I mean, you have JJ, and the boys, of course, but -- I don’t know,” she says, and, just like with JJ, Kiara lets it hang, knowing she’s not done. “I thought you’d understand.” 

“I get it,” Kiara says, and she doesn’t have to think before she says it. She understands  _ exactly _ what Sarah’s going through, being left behind by a community, given up on by parents pushing for a different kind of potential. “But you’ve got me.” 

Sarah’s smile is blinding, and Kiara feels raw in the heat of it. “I do?” she asks, and somewhere, a part of the wall Kiara has so arduously built crumbles away. She nods. 

Sarah’s body lunges forward on instinct before she stops herself, and Kiara rolls her eyes and holds her arms out, and Sarah is grinning as she falls into them. Emotions writhe and roil under Kiara’s skin as she realizes that she’s missed her best friend. There’s anger still, but old and stale, along with fresh guilt for not seeing how Sarah had been struggling, but Kiara reminds herself that no matter what, they have each other here, now, and that things can and will get better. 

Sarah leans back out of the embrace, and remembers her manners, popping up and offering Kiara something to drink. It’s only about three, but Sarah gets a bottle of white wine anyway, and they sip it as they catch up, making up for four years of lost time. The conversation flows easily, a friendship picking up from where it left off, grown women recognizing the ghosts of the girls they left behind and smiling at the echoes they find in each other and themselves. 

“How are things with John B, though,” Kiara finds herself asking, relaxed now, melting into the comfortable couch, easy and warm with her second glass of wine. “Besides the obvious.” 

Sarah’s quiet for a moment, twisting the thin gold chain of her necklace around her pointer finger. “They’re good,” she answers, but it’s quiet, almost unsure. She knows that Kiara won’t accept that answer, and, after a beat, elaborates. “I don’t know,” she says again, buying time. “It’s like, I have this part of me that won’t let me be happy, you know?” Kiara takes a sip of her wine instead of answering, uncomfortably familiar with the concept. “I have this amazing boyfriend and we have our own place and I have this career, and --” she lets out a frustrated breath. “John B is  _ so _ happy,” she says, “you should see him when he comes home from work.” 

He’d recently started working as a surf instructor, his first season as one, and JJ had made fun of him for having to teach tourons and kooks, but John B argued that kids were different. He loved the children he worked with, showed up to dawn patrol full of stories from the previous day and sometimes plastic beaded or messily woven bracelets from his students. It was heartwarming, to see the way he lit up talking about them, how earnest he was in praising their accomplishments and progress. Kiara ribbed him with the rest, but it was genuinely sweet. 

“But you aren’t?” Kiara prompts. 

Sarah’s eyes go far away and glossy, and Kiara quietly hopes she won’t start crying again. “I should be,” she says, “but I just --” she swallows. “I feel so lost, still. Like I’m waiting for something.” The words feel like stone in Kiara’s veins, cold and heavy and comforting somehow, still. 

“I get what you mean,” she says softly. Sarah sniffles, and Kiara leans forward without hesitation this time, putting her hand on Sarah’s shoulder, smiling kindly when she leans into the touch. After a moment, she lets her hand fall and leans back into the armrest, taking a sip of her wine and letting the acidic liquid sit on her tongue, thinking about what Sarah said. Kiara feels more lost than waiting, unsure of what she should be waiting  _ for _ . It’s a shattering of sorts, to see Sarah Cameron’s perfect crystal world come shattering apart in one afternoon. Kiara had been envious for a while, of her perfect relationship and her perfect life laid out for her. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that Sarah might not want it. 

“It’s okay, you know,” Kie says, taking another sip. Sarah looks up at her, only halfway back from being jostled from her thoughts. 

“What is?” Sarah asks. 

“To want something else.” And suddenly, it’s that simple.

_ It’s okay to want something else _ . She almost feels stupid, with how obvious it finally is. She’s been putting off real life for so long, because she  _ didn’t want it _ , didn’t want the fancy private school or the overpriced shoebox apartment or the rat race for the office that may have two windows but would still smell like white-man sweat, anyway. She wants something else. She doesn’t know what it is yet, hasn’t let herself explore the possibilities, so mired in her dread that any semblance of hope for something else was drowning in the fog. 

“Like what?” Sarah asks.

Kiara shrugs. “Anything at all.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> readers, this work has gotten to the point where I have to work on the chap in progress in a second doc cause the whole thing takes too damn long to load. it's 65 pages now. What??? so like, if you're here and still reading this monstrosity, I appreciate you, know that you are encouraging my nonsense hobby and that means more to me than words can express.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://homebody-nobody.tumblr.com/)  
> Thanks to [katie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaatiekinss/pseuds/kaatiekinss) for beta'ing and ofc the [jiara gc](https://hvitstark.tumblr.com/gcshenanigans) for all their ideas, help, and support   
> don't forget to tip ur fic writers   
> (the tips are comments)


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